On the Waterfront

Last week we went for a ride on the Clipper City for a sunset sail across the New York Harbor. Departures take place at Pier 17 at South Street Seaport. The Clipper City is one of America's largest sailing boats still in commercial operation at 160 feet long, with masts rising 135 feet off the deck. It's a faithful replica of the clipper ships that sailed a century ago, rebuilt from the original plans borrowed from the National Archives.


This is the view from the boat near the pier. We were docked for 30 minutes too long and we were getting antsy that we were going to miss the sunset.


Finally, we started moving along but the sky's colors were rapidly changing.




The moment we were waiting for.


Everyone on the ship was silent at this point. Majestically stunning.



It was beautiful when the plane flew right above the final moments of the setting sun.

And just when we thought we couldn't see anything more beautiful than what we had just witnessed, we see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, and that faint view was simply poetic.


The always powerful symbol, Ellis Island.


This photo of the Statue of Liberty was our favorite photo we took that night. It was the most proper way to say goodbye since we last visited her almost a year ago.


The Staten Island Ferry.

There was also a bar on our boat. Unfortunately, there was a group of obnoxiously loud and drunk females that apparently mistook this for a booze cruise. It's a shame when people would rather get stupid drunk than take in the beautiful sights with sober eyes.


If you're ever in New York during the warm months, you absolutely have to take a boat ride. There's tons of other boat options that also depart from Pier 17, like the Circle Line Cruise, smaller (more expensive) sail boats, fancier large boats with dinner and music options, and the Shearwater. A short video clip of our return to the pier.

The pier area is a bit of a tourist trap so we skipped the unappetizing looking restaurants and touristy shops and headed toward our subway stop. But en route, we saw this and had to stop.


We knew there was an L&L in New York but we had no interest in searching for the place. But since we had stumbled upon it, we decided to go in to taste a New York chicken katsu.


"The REAL Hawaiian Mac Salad."

The biggest difference we saw when we walked in was there's a sushi counter at L&L here. People in Hawaii would be so confused if they walked into L&L and saw a sushi chef.


The other difference was that this New York L&L didn't have that horrible old oil smell that's prevalent at almost every L&L, especially the L&L in downtown Honolulu.

There were things like a surfboard, spam musubi photos, and Honolulu Star Bulletin articles on the walls. But this just made us crack up. The first person I naturally thought of when I saw these was Marie. She would have been so mortified standing next to me as I poorly attempted to pronounce the words. Luckily, no one in New York cares.

And here it is. It's been ages since we had a chicken katsu plate with three scoops of white rice. It tasted slightly different from what we remember the chicken Katsu in Hawaii to taste like but it was still good. Main difference - this plate cost us $10.