Upper West Side Tour Guide Extraordinaire

A visit from Cousin Kyle.  My 1st cousin Kyle, from TN is here in NYC presenting a paper on Social Business and we got to take him out and show him an afternoon on the Upper West Side.  We met for brunch at Jacob's Pickle (85th and Amsterdam).  This restaurant is New York's spin on Southern Food.  The do a few things really well...You guessed it...pickles (fried mainly) and biscuits.  We then continued walking East toward the 85th St. entrance to Central Park.  Sophie got down and played at Mariner's Playground.  It's one of my favorites because there are 3 different sizes of "ship" shaped structures, in order to accommodate all sizes of little ones.  She loves steering the ship and when I'm feeling especially brave, I let her play in the giant sand box.  Today was not one of those terribly brave moments.  With Hurricane Sandy just having reeked havoc on NYC, I shutter to think what may have washed into that sand box...so I'm going to leave that discovery to someone other than myself.   We then headed down and further into the park to find Bethesda Fountain, a must for those visiting New York and Central park for the first time.  If they haven't seen this in a movie yet, they will.  Taking the Promenade with the tree canopy and statues looking down on us closer to the south end of the park, we stopped and paid a dollar to hear a joke from a street performer.  At Columbus Circle, we exited the park.  Eric left to go to work and I went into the Time Warner Center to use there wonderfully clean bathrooms.  Kyle, Sophie and I headed up Broadway and Sophie took a nap in the stroller.  We walked past Lincoln Center and then took Columbus up to 81st, where we spent the afternoon in the Museum of Natural History.    With a stomach full of Mamma's Famous (86th and Broadway) NY Pizza, we sent Kyle back to Brooklyn via Times Square.  This was an awesome full circle walk that included tons of great Upper West Side landmarks.  I will totally use this walk again, even when I'm not introducing a first-timer.  As for Soph, in true Sophie fashion, it took her about 30 minutes and 4 bites of eggs to warm up to Kyle.  At that point, the switch was flipped and they were thick as thieves.