The past week was Fleet Week here in New York. This has been an annual occasion since 1984. Several ships from the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard were docked at the piers around the city and were open for public viewing. There were also various military displays and demonstrations throughout the city. The original schedule listed a helicopter raid demo in Prospect park here in Brooklyn for the time we usually walk the dogs in the afternoon. We headed over but there were no helicopters to be seen. I checked the schedule later and it had been removed, so I guess it was just a mistake. Oh well, the dogs probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway. We did manage to visit…

We had a nice long Memorial Day weekend, and the weather was nice too. Erica’s friend Kirsten came and stayed with us, all the way from New Jersey, so we took her out to see some of the sights around Brooklyn. We headed up to Brooklyn Heights and walked up the promenade to the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge was celebrating it’s 125th anniversary so there were lots of people and sights to see. One of the sights was the Telectroscope. This is an optical device that runs through a tunnel deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa. ;-) We then walked through DUMBO to…

This weekend Erica and I went to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. They said it was supposed to rain in the afternoon and on Saturdays admission is free between 10am and Noon, so we headed out right around 10am. The gardens are just a few blocks away from the apartment and we actually look down on part of them from the park we usually take the dogs to each morning. We had a good time wandering through the gardens until just around lunch time, then we decided to go find a new place to eat. We hopped on the subway and ended up in Brooklyn Heights. We walked around for a bit until we found a nice little diner called Happy…

After a few rainy days, Erica and I got out of the apartment and went out to explore the city some more. We didn’t make much of a plan so after hopping on the subway, we ended up in lower Manhattan. We thought about taking the Staten Island Ferry for a ride because it goes out near the Statue of Liberty and you can get some good pictures. The skies were a little gray though so we decided to come back and do that another day since we didn’t have any other reason to go to Staten Island. After that we made our way over to the South Street Seaport. We had seen the ships docked at the piers several…