12:31pm: One of the World's Natural Wonders
Click to Enlarge: Belvedere Castle
No sailing this weekend, so I opted for two days of softball in Central Park, one of the natural wonders of the world. That photo above is Belvedere Castle, located next to Shakespeare's Garden, designed in 1865 by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, and built in 1869. It used to house the New York Meteorological Observatory, founded by Dr. Daniel Draper in 1868, and now hosts the U.S. Weather Bureau...
Anyway, I booted up my rig (which consists of my backpack--loaded with my Wilson A-2000 baseball glove, a hardball, a softball, my Olympus C-3040 digital camera, some Gatorade and sugarless bubble gum (a baseball staple), and my bike--a Bianchi racer whose racing days are long behind it (or at least me)--with Louisville Slugger Warlord Softball bat replacing the water bottle in the bottle holder, you can't hit .300 with a bottle of Perrier. Here's my rig:
Click to Enlarge: My Rig
As I was biking along the path toward the Great Lawn, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I saw something which gave me paws, so I hopped off the bike and sniffed around a little bit, kicked at the gravel and pulled out my camera for some shots of this guy. At first I thought he was rehearsing a graduation speech or something, until I realized he was preaching...to no one, just to passers-by. But I kept it in the back of my head that he must be waiting for someone, maybe Godot. Eitherwise, maybe he really was rehearsing a graduation speech, or one kind or another.
Click to Enlarge: Are We In Tune
Anyway, I played softball all day Saturday and all day Sunday, and on the way back on Sunday I rode past the Metropolitan Museum of Art and snapped some photos:
Click to Enlarge: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Altogether, it was a great weekend in the park, and I took a bunch more photos, which you can see on my Happy Hour Site, on the June 23 Photos Page.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. On the way out I met a wedding party: bride, groom, maid of honor and best man, roaming through the labrynthine walkways of the east meadow and looking for all the world like they were lost. They stopped everyone that passed, asking for directions and looking at their watches. When they reached me the bride stepped up, smiling with shy embarrassment, and asked me if I had seen the...well, you know...
Click to Enlarge: "Have You Seen A Preacher?"