Today, March 13th, I had a ticket for a 3:00 p.m. performance by the New Jersey Symphony at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, and I decided to go by train. I drove to the New Bridge Landing station, where I boarded Pascack Valley Line Train #2112, which departed at 12:45 p.m. and arrived at Secaucus at 1:12 p.m., giving me plenty of time to transfer to Northeast Corridor Train #7845, scheduled to depart at 1:23 p.m. The train operated a few minutes late, and we arrived at the New Brunswick station at 2:17 p.m., six minutes late. That was fine, as it takes about 10 minutes to walk to the State Theater, which didn’t open to the public until 2:30 p.m.
Continue Reading A Trip to the Symphony: State TheatreFrom Florida on Valentine’s Day
Member Gary Kazin, a “snowbird” who winters in Florida and is an avid cyclist, sent in this report from his travels this past Valentine’s Day:
We’re in Kissimmee, Florida, an appropriate destination for Valentine’s Day weekend, for the Florida Folk Dance Council’s Winter Camp, which started Friday evening and ends at noon Monday. Eat (too much), sleep (too little), dance. . . .
I’m a ‘non-dancing spouse’ so I get breakfast and dinner and can do my thing during the day. We’ve done this before and I bring my bike. We start our travel a day early to sight-see northbound but go directly to Boca Raton on Monday. I rode 42 miles Saturday to visit a state park northwest of here; the weather was great and the ride went well.
On the return, about 5 miles from the hotel, I was riding on a service road and heard a crash behind me. A 63-year-old man had crashed an electric dirt bike; it apparently had gone off the edge of a sidewalk where the dirt had eroded away and the bike dropped about four inches. The rider didn’t follow the bike down and went over the handlebars, falling to the ground ahead of it. Some of these bikes can reach 30 mph and he had no helmet!
A Trip to the Symphony: NJPAC
This past Saturday night, I had a ticket for a performance of the New Jersey Symphony at NJPAC in Newark. The concert started at 8:00 p.m., and I decided to take NJ Transit to the concert.
My Pascack Valley Line train was scheduled to leave the Anderson Street station in Hackensack at 6:56 p.m. (Interestingly, I would be taking Train #2122 on 1/22/22!) I left my home in Teaneck at 6:47 p.m. and arrived at the station six minutes later, at 6:53 p.m. On weekends, you can park in the station parking lot right across the tracks from the station, and I did so. As I was crossing the tracks to the station, I could hear the bells from a distant grade crossing, and my train pulled into the station at 6:55 p.m. It consisted of four Comet V cars, of which only one was open to passengers. That car, though, was adequate to accommodate the 35 or so passengers on the train.