Reflections 13 Years Later
Fast-forward to June 2025—13 years since our trip to NYC, yet the memories remain surprisingly fresh. Though we haven’t returned to NYC, it’s not for lack of enjoyment; we’ve simply explored other cities instead. If given the opportunity, would we go back? Definitely. Would we do things differently? Absolutely.
Travel & Accessibility—What We Learned
Perhaps one of the most significant and lasting takeaways from that New York adventure was a much deeper, more personal understanding of the challenges faced when travel involves limited mobility. At the time, if I’m honest, I didn’t fully appreciate the critical importance of details like consistent lift access at subway stations, or the daunting nature of a wide gap between the train and the platform. Looking back, these are aspects that definitely deserved more forethought in our planning. Still, that trip powerfully reinforced what could be achieved in a day, even with those hurdles. It spurred us on, encouraging us to travel more, because we learned that despite the accessibility challenges, there was almost always a way forward, a solution to be found.
The Changing Skyline & City Evolution
New York, more than many places, is a city that never stops evolving; it’s in a constant state of flux. The spectacular skyline we admired from the Top of the Rock on that special night has undoubtedly changed in ways we can’t yet fully picture. Landmarks from our 2012 journey have vanished into the annals of city history – Langans pub, where we enjoyed a couple of memorable meals, is long gone, and the hotel we stayed in, I believe, has since been rebranded as The Square Hotel (if my detective work is correct). These shifts are a poignant reminder that cities breathe, grow, and transform over time. It’s this very dynamism, this sense of a place always reinventing itself, that has drawn us back to another city we visited more than once – but that, as they say, is a story for another journal.
How NYC Shaped Our Future Travels
That first foray into the Big Apple genuinely set a theme for much of our travel in the years that followed: exploring the great cities of the U.S. became a real passion. Given our personal circumstances, long, rambling countryside walks were never really going to be a practical option for us, so urban exploration, with its manageable pace and accessible attractions (mostly!), became our preferred way to see America. This trip also ignited a far deeper passion for documenting our journeys – not just through scribbled notes, but through more considered photography and, later on, video. What started as a purely personal endeavour to remember our adventures gradually evolved into something bigger: first a blog, and eventually a dedicated website portal to house all our travel stories.
From Journal to Legacy—Growing a Creative Project
When I initially conceived this appendix, I imagined it would be a fairly quick update, a brief note on how I felt about the trip all these years later. It’s safe to say it’s become rather more involved than that! What began as roughly 7,000 words of loosely gathered notes and memories from 2012 has transformed, through this process of rewriting and reflecting, into a journal nearly double that size. And it hasn’t stopped there. Over the past few months of working on this, I’ve found myself thinking about how to take these travelogues even further – perhaps turning them into eBooks, maybe even building another website specifically for them, complete with audio versions. This time, though, I’m challenging myself to code it all from scratch (albeit with a little friendly AI assistance along the way!).
Rediscovering Memories Through Writing
The act of reading back through this journal, of re-crafting those original, sometimes sparse, notes, has been a fascinating journey in itself. It has resurfaced memories I’d completely overlooked in my initial draft, moments and feelings that were lurking just beneath the surface. It’s remarkable how recollections can sharpen and gain clarity with the passage of time – not just the factual details, but the emotions attached to them. Revisiting these reflections now, I can see so clearly how much that first big trip to New York shaped not just our future travels, but also the way we choose to remember and preserve those precious experiences.
Con 2025