We’re off on another transatlantic adventure. Someone was getting a little bit excited…
Tag Archives: travel
Today’s Photos: The Trip
On Sunday, we all got up early, loaded up the car and headed to Heathrow Airport. Some 18 hours later – and after two cars, two planes and several trains and trams – we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa’s — tired and jet lagged but happy. We had been a little worried ahead of time: Nyan has flown transatlantic several times, but he was not nearly so energetic and mobile as he is now. How would he do on an eight-hour flight to Chicago?
We needn’t have worried, as it turned out. The young man continues to impress and amaze us with his ability to handle pretty much any situation, and he was a joy the entire trip. Seriously.
Nyan as we check in at Heathrow
Today’s Photos: Nyan Thomas in the Car
Just a few shots of the young man getting set for a roadtrip, picture book in hand…
Welcome Home! (photos and video)
Sunday evening marked the triumphant return home of Nyan Thomas and his Mommy. Daddy was at JFK waiting for them, and was it a happy reunion? It was. Both looked happy and healthy, if a bit worn-down from the transatlantic flight. Daddy snapped a quick shot on his BlackBerry with the little man. Daddy looks happy; Nyan looks exhausted:
Sure enough, it didn’t take long once we strapped him into the car seat to fall fast asleep and stay that way the whole way home. (Shame too; rather than taking Atlantic Avenue – a pothole-filled road that, though the most direct route and a major thoroughfare, passes through some of the ugliest and poorest parts of Brooklyn; not the way I wanted to welcome my family home! – we took the Belt Parkway, a freeway that skirts the shoreline. Couldn’t see much at night, but passing under the Verrazano Bridge, and seeing New York Harbor dotted with large ships, was a pretty inspiring sight). Here’s the sleepy man once we got home:
He did manage to wake up so we could change his diaper and put him in his pjs:
(apologies for the lousy picture quality of these pics; taken with a BlackBerry, which isn’t known for sharp photos)
Then it was sound asleep for the rest of the night. Well, until 3am, when he woke up and would not go back to sleep. (In his defense, that was 8am to his body clock.) He crawled around, he babbled, he crawled some more, he pooped… Mommy and I basically traded shifts for the rest of the night, one of us keeping him company while the other napped, but we were both pretty much zombies by morning. Naps (two hours for Mommy, one for me) helped. And the little man? Full of beans, as we see from this video from Monday morning:
This evening he went down around 8pm. We’re expecting him to wake up a little later tomorrow – 4am, probably – as his body clock slowly resets.
Update: Nope. 2am. Going in the wrong direction! Then back to sleep, then up at 3am. Then back down after a while, then up at 6am.
Where in the World is Nyan Thomas?
Kid’s got more frequent flyer miles than most adults! Yes, he’s back in the UK for the next couple-few weeks. Mommy has some career-related things to take care of over there, so off they went.
It is, as you can imagine, a bit quiet here at NyanThomas.com Global Headquarters on the Mean Streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But fret not, dear blog reader; we have a bunch of photos and videos to share in the coming days, and we’ll also be sharing fresh new content from the UK as well. So don’t forget to check back soon!
In the meantime, a couple photos from the trip to the airport, and an anecdote: I drove them to JFK and dropped them off at the terminal to start the check-in procedure while I parked the car and brought the luggage in. When I got up to the Virgin Atlantic check-in area, a few check-in people were standing there, ready to direct me to where I needed to go. I explained that my wife was already checking in and that I was just bringing the bags… “Oh, yes, they’re right over there,” the woman exclaimed. “You have an adorable son!”
Yes, it seems that Nyan Thomas had turned on the charm. And he kept it going, too, as we finished the check-in procedures. He was all smiles and giggles at the women behind the counter. And they were all smiles and giggles right back.
It did not, unfortunately, land them a free upgrade, but hey.
Here, then, photos from just before Nyan and Mommy headed through security.
And a screenshot from a Skype call the other day…
Blogging from 38,000 Feet
Not really – we’re all back in Brooklyn after a lengthy, but uneventful, journey home on Tuesday. Three take-aways from the flight:
1. The kid is a trooper, and a true traveler. Nary a cry or a whine or a note of dismay during the entire eight-plus-hour flight; the only real problem was that he got very bored after a while, and really wanted to lie on his back, roll over and try to crawl. No room to do that on a plane, of course. So he got a little restless. But so did his parents after eight hours in coach.
2. The kid is a flirt. Big time. Any female within about 20 rows of our seat was a target: he’d find a pretty female, stare at them ’til they caught his gaze, and then smile, coo, stick his hand in his mouth – you know, standard flirting behavior. He got really tight with one of the flight attendants, too. (As for the fellas, young Nyan Thomas couldn’t care less: one dude was passing by and stopped by our seat for a minute, waiting for the aisle to clear. The guy looked over at Nyan and gave him a smile; Nyan had been looking at a toy but looked up when he felt someone staring at him. When he saw that it was just a dude, he couldn’t be bothered and immediately went back to his toy.)
3. Poop on a plane… ‘Nuff said, really. Nyan Thomas pooped not once, not twice, but three times as we soared high above the North Atlantic. Stinky, goopy, get-everywhere poops too. We got to know the changing table in the tiny airplane bathroom very, very well.
All good though as we’re home, unpacking and starting to settle back in to life here in chilly wintry New York. More photos and commentary on the excellent trip to the UK to come. For now, here’s the young man on the plane, shortly before take-off; he’s wearing his shades ’cause we didn’t want the bright lights to bother him. Also ’cause he just looks cool.
Today’s photos: selections from Colchester
Here are a few photos from recent days here in Colchester. Today, young Nyan Thomas came face to face with wolves, tigers, a couple of Burmese pythons, and some iguanas. Yes, we went to the Colchester Zoo! Photos on that trip coming soon (sneak preview: mom and dad were more impressed than their son, five months being a bit young for a child to really enjoy a zoo, but hey…). Here are a few from recent days, with more coming soon:
Check out this sequence of the boy doing his newest trick: rolling over! Actually this series misses the part where he goes from his usual on-his-back post and rolls onto his belly and lifts his head high and proud; this gets the tail end of that sequence, in which he flops back onto his back. It’s quite a sight to see, regardless.
And here’s the young man after a bath:
And just loving life:
Finally, we’ve posted some more photos on Facebook; just click here.
And they’re off!
Nyan Thomas and Mommy headed to the UK on Saturday evening – his first flight, his first international travel, his first time to see the entire K. family… a big trip! We were of course a bit worried about how he would take to the flight itself – but we needn’t have been. Our boy is nothing if not good, and a good traveler too: Mommy reports that he was a perfect gentleman the entire flight, even during the two-and-a-half hour departure delay! He spent the entire time either sleeping or – natch – flirting with the flight attendants. That’s our boy!
They landed Sunday morning in London and are now safely home sweet home in Colchester, where Beatrice will rest and relax, while Nyan Thomas rests, relaxes, and is spoiled beyond his wildest dreams by the K. grandparents, multiple aunts and uncles, many cousins and friends and well-wishers… And he’ll Skype with Daddy once or twice a day. Yeah, Daddy couldn’t make it – work, you know – but I’ll be flying over there in three weeks’ time for a family reunion.
Not to worry, though, dear reader, we’ll still be updating this blog as regularly as we can! So be sure to check back.
Here are a few pictures from the trip to JFK airport:
Nyan fell asleep during the car ride over, and stayed that way through check-in:
He stayed zonked out while Mommy and Daddy waited outside of security. (Daddy couldn’t get a pass to get through security, so we waited as long as we could before Nyan and Mommy headed through the metal detectors.) Here are Mommy and Daddy with their boy.
A Bunch of Firsts for Nyan
Our boy got several firsts last weekend. His first road trip. His first sight of snow. His first visit to a Burmese Buddhist temple in New Jersey. Okay, on that last one, it was a first for his mom and his dad as well.
We’d been wanting to visit this temple for a while now. It was founded by some Burmese immigrants, and features a stupa that’s modeled after the Shwedagon Pagoda in Burma. That one is several hundred feet tall, and is said to house, somewhere in its base, six hairs plucked from the head of the original Buddha himself. The one in Jersey doesn’t quite have that. It’s only, perhaps, 50 feet tall, if that, and it’s surrounded by McMansions and New Jersey. But it’s a beautiful structure, and the attached temple serves a noble purpose. It was a great place for a quick road trip.
Last Saturday, New York and much of the East Coast got blasted by a rather nasty, wet, slushy, icy, snowy – and early! – storm. In Brooklyn, we got a full day’s worth of cold rain, sleet and really heavy snow that snapped some tree branches, caused plenty of localized flooding on the roads, and generally made for a wet mucky day. (Really looking forward to winter!) Sunday, though, came bright and clear, although cold, and by midday most of the snow and slush had melted away. So we picked up a rental car, strapped Nyan into his car seat and his car seat into the backseat, and headed south – down the BQE, across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, through Staten Island, and into the quasi-rural setting of Central New Jersey.
It was actually only about an hour’s drive, and that included the slow bits through Brooklyn before we got on the expressway. Definitely a world away; lots of freeways and tollways, strip malls, McMansions, even open farmland. Felt like we were in the opening credits of The Sopranos. We found the temple pretty easily, and pulled in to a muddy parking lot.
We weren’t entirely sure what to expect, and it took us a few minutes to figure out the lay of the land. The stupa itself was obvious. And there was a long, narrow two-story building under construction and a small wood-frame two-story house. Nothing that said ‘temple’ to us… but we walked around to the back of the house, slopped through the muddy back yard, and walked in. Sure enough, this was the temple – at least until the under-construction temple/community center is done – and it’s a working temple, with Burmese Buddhist monks and an abbot overseeing them. It’s also a community center, and we had to pass through a small kitchen packed full of Burmese women cooking Burmese food. They of course offered us some; we declined, out of politeness mostly, I’d say.
It wasn’t hard, in this small house, to find the front room, which serves as the main room of the temple. We hung out here for a bit, bowing before the small statue of Buddha, reading about the history of the temple, making a donation to help with the construction. The temple’s monks, it turned out, where in prayer downstairs, and would be for a while, which put a crimp in our plans to have Nyan blessed by the abbot. But that’s alright. We did have a brief conversation with one monk who passed though, and who took the boy into his arms. Nyan, being Nyan, pretty much charmed him. And then, as soon as the monk handed Nyan back to us, he started fussing. Nyan, that is, not the monk. (Nyan had been so good on the drive over, napping or just sitting there quietly.) We’ve learned that sometimes when he’s fussing for no good reason, a change of scenery, or just some movement, will do the trick. So we gave some cash as a donation to help the construction of the community center outside, slipped back into our coast and shoes and headed out to the stupa.
It’s an impressive structure, a tall column of white concrete, I guess, partially covered this day in snow, and glistening in the bright late October sunlight. Atop the column were many small bells which tinkled softly in the breeze. We found the corners of the stupa that correspond to the day of the week we were born – Saturday for Beatrice, Tuesday for Nyan and I – and said our prayers.
A few photos and soaking in the quiet atmosphere and it was time to go. We strapped Nyan back in and headed up the highway, stopping for an early dinner at a random Italian restaurant along US 9. The food was good enough; Nyan sat quietly next to us in his car seat, and we marveled at how the stereotype of the New Jersey native is, in fact, not far from the truth, based on our fellow diners. ‘Nuff said.
We got home after dark. It was a long day, and a lot of driving for a relatively brief stop at the temple. But well worth it. We may go back to get Nyan a more formal blessing from the monks, and may make further donations to help the cause. Not bad for his first road trip.
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