Complex Numbers

Five in Five

I did a thing yesterday that I've never done before.

It's not much of an accomplishment, really. And I didn't exactly set out to do it. It was only toward the end of the experience that I said to myself (and my passenger): "Huh. In all of my half-century plus of visiting New York, I've never done that before."

Also, in fairness, it's very easy to do something in New York that you've never done before. It would take more than a lifetime to do everything in this city, after which there would be a whole buttload of new things to do. Kind of like my life goal of visiting every brewery.

Anyway, after that buildup, the thing that I did seems even more anticlimactic, even trivial, but I'm going to tell you anyway: in one afternoon, I visited all five boroughs of the city. Starting in Staten Island, I drove over the Verrazano into Brooklyn, around the Belt Parkway into Queens, stopped at my mother's grave just outside the city on Long Island, then crossed over into the Bronx and thence into Manhattan.

I'm told that one can accomplish this feat on foot by participating in the New York Marathon. Hahahahahaha no. Besides, it would take me more than one afternoon to runcrawl the marathon. More like a week. There are myriad other ways to do it, too. One interesting routing problem would be to develop a route, whether walking, driving, biking, or public transportationing, of minimum distance while still touching ground in all five boroughs. My route wasn't in any way efficient; it was mostly just a result of getting from New Jersey to the cemetery and then to Manhattan.

It's not an accomplishment at all, just a fun bit of trivia. Want to impress someone? Visit all 50 US states in one day. Sounds difficult, but I'll bet someone with a private jet and lots of money could find a way, and probably get all kinds of publicity for it. Me, I once drove all the way from the easternmost point to the westernmost point of the Continental US (walking the last steps between road and coast), which I thought was a bit of an accomplishment even though I purposely took my time, but no one put me on the news for it.

And hell, I haven't visited all 50 states yet. Alaska, Nebraska, and Michigan are still on my list, though never in winter.