Manhattanhenge, New York City

Manhattanhenge – sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Solstice – is a semi-annual occurrence in which the setting sun aligns with the east–west streets of the main street grid in Manhattan, New York City.

The term, as you might have already worked out, is derived from Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire.

Manhattanhenge was popularized in 2002 by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History. During Manhattanhenge, an observer on one of the gridded east-west streets will see the sun setting over New Jersey directly opposite from the street, along its centerline.

The dates of Manhattanhenge are usually around May 28 and July 12 or July 13 – spaced evenly around Summer Solstice. In 2011, Manhattanhenge occurred on May 31 at 8:17 p.m., and will occur again on July 11 at 8:25 p.m. The two corresponding mornings of sunrise right on the center lines of the Manhattan grid are approximately December 5 and January 8 – spaced evenly around Winter Solstice. As with the solstices and equinoxes, the dates vary somewhat from year to year.

Manhattanhenge in Popular Culture
Not surprisingly, the Manhattanhenge phenomenon has made it into popular culture, with the event appearing in an episode of CSI: NY that aired on November 25, 2009. Also, the closing scene from the 2010 film Morning Glory features Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), and Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams), walking off into the Manhattanhenge sunset.

Here’s a very brief 16 second time-lapse YouTube video of the Manhattanhenge event from 2008.

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The same phenomenon occurs in other cities with a uniform street grid. In Chicago, Illinois, for instance, the setting sun lines up with the grid system on September 25, a phenomenon known similarly as Chicagohenge. In Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the setting sun lines up with the east–west streets on October 25 and February 16, a phenomenon known locally as Torontohenge.

If any reader knows of similar phenomena happening around the world, please let us know via the Comments section below.

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Disabled Travellers and Flying

This is the second in an ongoing series of articles by Candy Harrington, examining travel issues as they relate to people with disabilities, particularly in the United States. If you haven’t done so, you may also like to read, Debunking Myths About Accessible Travel.

According to a 2005 study by the Open Doors Organization of Chicago, 84% of disabled travellers said they encountered obstacles when flying; while 82% reported access problems at airports.

Candy Harrington, author of Barrier-Free Travel; A Nuts and Bolts Guide for Wheelers and Slow Walkers, agrees that disabled travellers run into a lot of problems in the air. “I get a fair amount of reader feedback,” says Harrington, “and most of the complaints focus on air travel. Access problems range from deplaning delays and subsequent missed connections, to access obstacles in foreign airports and even cases of denied boarding for disabled passengers.”

For over 20 years, the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) has been he law of the land as far as accessible air travel is concerned; and thanks to periodic updates it has evolved to serve the needs of disabled travellers. The most recent revisions (effective May 13, 2009) serve to strengthen the law even more and offer greater protection to disabled travellers. Harrington points out some of these important changes, which will drastically improve the quality of the air travel experience for disabled travellers.

• The updated law legally extends coverage of the ACAA to all commercial flights to and from the US, including those operated by foreign air carriers. This means that foreign air carriers can no longer deny boarding to disabled passengers on flights to or from the US.
• Foreign airlines operating flights to or from the US must also ensure that disabled passengers can move through the terminal facilities at foreign airports.
• The law was edited to require the “prompt” deplaning of disabled passengers. The Department of Transportation (DOT) further defined prompt as “no later than as soon as the other passengers have deplaned.” This means that disabled passengers will no longer be left on planes well after the flight crew has departed.
• Employees or contractors providing airport wheelchair assistance are now required to make a brief restroom stop (upon request) if the restroom is located along the path of travel to the gate.
• The law also requires airlines to allow the on-board use of all FAA-approved portable oxygen concentrators, ventilators, respirators and CPAP machines. The DOT placed the burden of testing these devices on the manufacturers, not the airlines.
• The updated law specifies the dimensions of the on-board wheelchair storage space as being 13 inches by 36 inches by 42 inches. This eliminates ambiguity and will help passengers determine if their assistive device will fit in the limited priority storage area.
• If a service animal is unable to fit comfortably at the assigned seat location, the airline must now offer the passenger the opportunity to move to any open seat in the same class, that can safely accommodate the animal.
• Airline personnel are now required to assist disabled passengers at inaccessible ticket kiosks.
• Finally, although the new law stopped short of requiring airline websites to be accessible, it requires airlines to offer disabled passengers web-only fares that appear on inaccessible websites, by phone or another accessible reservation method.

Barrier-Free Travel; A Nuts and Bolts Guide for Wheelers and Slow Walkers, is available from your favourite bookstore or at www.BarrierFreeTravel.net, where Candy also blogs regularly about accessible travel issues.

Image courtesy of Disability Information Website...

Never to Old to Live and Learn

~ Yesterday, I signed up for a ten week Spanish For Fun and Travel course at an Adelaide based institution, the WEA. The Workers' Educational Association was founded in 1913, and is Australia's largest non-government adult community education organisation. It provides learning opportunities for anyone aged 15 years or older in its nearly 1800 short courses – for which the Association receives over 30,000 enrolments annually.

Using a concession card my ten week by two hour course cost me just AUD$112.00. That breaks down to a mere AUD$5.60 per hour! Even at the full price of AUD$124.00 the course is still incredibly cheap. Further down the track I may even sign up for a French or German language course. And why not? At the above prices, learning a language for ‘fun and travel’ is pretty much affordable to everyone.

I’ve decided to tackle Spanish first because next year I want to drive across America. I will probably start on the west coast at Los Angeles and either drive Route 66 to Chicago and New York, or drive across the south towards New Orleans and then up the east coast to New York.

After spending eight weeks in New York City last year, it quickly became apparent that a basic knowledge of Spanish would be very useful – not just in New York but wherever I happened to be in the United States. Of course it will be even more useful if I decide to take a side trip into Mexico during my road trip.

I know there are regional differences between Spanish as it is spoken in Spain as compared to Mexico (and indeed throughout Latin America), but I figure the little I learn during this course will be better than the complete lack of knowledge I now have.

From the USA I will be going to Europe, and since I have never been to Spain, I am considering a trip to that beautiful country too.

Life is for living and learning, folks, and now that I have the time, I plan to live and learn and travel as far and wide as my finances will allow.

By the way, the WEA is not unique to Adelaide. There are similar institutions elsewhere in Australia and overseas, so if you want embark on a journey of life-long learning, check out the sites below, or ask at your local public library for information about similar organisations in your city.

Links to Associated Sites

• WEA Sydney
• WEA UK
• WEA Illawarra
• Council of Adult Education Melbourne
• Adult Learning Association
• International Federation of Workers' Education Associations (IFWEA)

My Dream Vacation

~ So here’s a question for you.

If you had $100,000 and six months to spend it on your dream vacation, where would you go, and what would you do?

And just so you know: No, I don’t have a spare one hundred grand, either for you or myself, but I did think it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to fantasize about my dream vacation for a couple of hours (yes, I know, I do have too much time on my hands). Oh, and just for the record, I am not an intellectual!

Alright… I’ll go first. Let me see…

First up, starting from here (here being Adelaide, Australia), I would travel by merchant ship to the USA, island hopping my way across the Pacific Ocean. Stops along the way would include New Zealand, Tahiti, and Mexico, before disembarking in San Francisco.

From San Francisco, armed with a copy of Jamie Jensen’s Road Trip USA I would begin my long dreamed about road trip across the United States – first down the Pacific coast to Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tucson, Arizona catching up with relatives along the way (making sure I visited Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon of course).

Most serious road trip enthusiasts dream about driving the length of the famed Route 66 at least once in their lives, and I’m no exception. From Tucson, it wouldn’t be to hard to head north again and join Route 66 at Flagstaff. However, being a ‘completist’ (is that even a real word?), if I was going to drive Route 66, I would have to head back to LA and start the journey proper from there.

Now those of you familiar with the song, Route 66, will immediately realize that would be doing it all wrong. According to the song, Route 66 “Winds from Chicago to LA,” but do I really want to fly or drive all the way to Chicago, just so I can spend several weeks singing the lines of the song every mile along the route in the proper order they were written?

Of course, you are right. Am I a completist or aren’t I?

Ok, so I’d fly to Chicago and drive Route 66 north to south (or to be more precise – north to south-west), and make sure I have lots of great adventures along the way. Unfortunately, that means I am back where I started – sort of. I now have to get from LA to New York City. I could fly, but where’s the fun in that? So after resting my numb bum in Los Angeles for a few days, it’s back into the hire car for the long drive across the American south and up the east coast to New York.

After spending a couple of weeks in New York City, it’s on to the Republic of Ireland – via Niagara Falls and Canada. Well, why not?

Now, relax. I don’t mean to bore you with every stop along the way, so here in some sort of order is the rest of my fantasy vacation: From Ireland I would go to England, France, Spain, and Morocco. The north African leg of my trip also takes in Senegal, Mali, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt. From there it’s on to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, and the Netherlands. Now it’s time to rug up and head north into Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. By train we cross the Russian steppes to Mongolia and China. We’re on the homeward stretch now. Just a few more countries left (Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Thailand) before finally setting down in Darwin, Australia.

From Darwin I would drive back to Adelaide the ‘long way’. That is, via Kakadu, Alice Springs, Mount Isa, Brisbane, and then down along east coast passing through Sydney, Melbourne, and finally on to Adelaide.

Whew, that is a sum total of 33 countries in six months, and more miles than I care to think about.

Is it possible? Would $100,000 be enough?

Hey, what do I know? This is a fantasy vacation after all. A pipe dream. A flight of the imagination. A meditation on the possible – or if you insist, the impossible. But who knows? Maybe, just maybe, if I can’t do the whole trip I can do parts of it. Maybe I don’t have to complete the whole journey in six months. What if I only do the ocean voyage and the road trip? That would be a good start in anyone’s book – wouldn’t it? I can always tackle other parts of the journey later.

So what does your dream vacation involve?

Don’t hold back. Let your imagination run wild, and let me know via the comments section below. Alternatively, you could write a longer piece and send it to me. With your permission I might republish it here as part of my blog.

Go on, share the dream.

Top 10 Destinations for Opera Lovers: Part 2

~ Frommer's asked the editors of OPERA NEWS magazine, whose European Travel issue hits newsstands mid-April, to come up with the top 10 destinations that should be included on every opera lover's roadmap this year.

I listed the first five (in no particular order), in an earlier posting on this blog.

Here are the last five top destinations for lovers of opera.

FRANCE: Paris
Has any place inspired more operas than Paris, perhaps the most romantic city on earth? Paris's newest home for opera is the spacious but somewhat chilly Opéra de la Bastille, which boasts an unrestricted view of the stage from each of its 2,700 seats, but the city's most famous operatic landmark remains the opulent nineteenth-century Palais Garnier, familiar to lovers of Broadway's Phantom of the Opera. Don't miss a chance to visit Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, an Art Deco masterpiece that is one of Europe's prettiest theaters, or the devastatingly elegant Théatre du Châtelet. Also worth a trip is the Salle Favart, its frothy good looks an apt metaphor for the light-hearted attractions of its home company, the Opéra-Comique.

THE UNITED STATES: Civic Opera House, Chicago
Chicago's Civic Opera House is one of the most beautiful buildings in a city that prides itself on its architecture. Built in 1929, this ageless amalgam of Renaissance revival and Art Deco has superb acoustics, excellent sightlines and sumptuous public spaces, including a handsomely proportioned lobby designed by Jules Guerin. The theatre was home to several Chicago opera companies before its most distinguished tenant, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, arrived in 1954. The Lyric established the City of Big Shoulders as an international opera capital, offering the opera world's brightest stars in top-notch productions. After the Lyric season ends in late winter, Chicago's opera lovers hold on until spring, when the adventurous Chicago Opera Theatre presents its three-opera season at the slick new Harris Theatre for Music and Dance in Millennium Park.



SWEDEN: The Drottningholm Court Theatre
Built in 1766 for the Swedish queen, Lovisa Ulrika, the Drottningholm Court Theatre-located in the Royal Domain of Drottningholm, only a short bus or boat ride from the capital city of Stockhom-is a thing of exquisite artifice. The theatre was a beehive of musical and theatrical activity during the late eighteenth century, but when Lovisa Ulrika's son (and political enemy), King Gustaf III was assassinated-an event used as the basis for Verdi's opera Un Ballo in Maschera,-the theatre fell into disuse; it was a storage facility for much of the nineteenth century. Drottningholm was recalled to life in the 1920s and now presents a brief summer season each year, with the repertory usually drawn from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spring and summer tours of the theatre and the palace grounds are relatively infrequent, in order to spare its eighteenth-century charms from the wear-and-tear of twenty-first-century life. Early booking is advisable.

THE UNITED STATES: Santa Fe Opera
In 1957, New York conductor John Crosby started an opera company in a highly unlikely locale: the breathtaking mountains of northern New Mexico. Crosby's impossible dream has endured: every July and August since then, Santa Fe Opera has presented an imaginative, exciting mix of familiar classics, rarely-performed treasures and brand-new works, their casts generally populated by the best young singers in America. Opera lovers from all over the world have been thrilled by Santa Fe's singular natural beauty, an element in the company's appeal celebrated by its dramatically proportioned adobe theatre, which has unequalled views of the high desert landscape - and the heart-stopping beauty of its sunsets. Daytime hours in Santa Fe can be spent sampling the myriad charms of the city itself and of its thriving local community of world-class artists and artisans.

ENGLAND: Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Sussex
The thoroughly English character of Glyndebourne Festival Opera reflects the personality of its eccentric founder, John Christie, who developed the ambitious scheme to offer festival-quality opera performances on his East Sussex estate beginning in 1934. Christie's original theatre was eventually replaced by a completely new facility in 1994, but the abiding presence of the Christie home and the continued involvement of Christie's descendants in festival life have allowed Glyndebourne to retain much of its original atmosphere. The operas of Mozart have been at the core of Glyndebourne's repertory for all of its existence, but more esoteric fare - including some world premieres - is also among the company specialties.

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Image courtesy Civic Opera House, Chicago