We got up early and walked to meet my close friend since childhood, Matt. Matt lives in Inwood and wanted to walk his dog, so we met at Bagel Corner in Riverdale. It’s a small, simple shop but it has fresh warm bagels of all types, and a wide variety of toppings and cream cheeses. At Matt’s recommendation I tried the whitefish spread, something I’ve seen but never tried. It’s a smoked white fish ~salad almost; a lighter version of lox. Most importantly for me, it has none of the smell nor flavor of a canned fish, so I really liked it. I almost remembered to take a picture… I will next time, it’s a great spot. I really wish we had a similar place near our home.

From Bagel Corner we walked south over the Henry Hudson Bridge onto Manhattan Island.

It is so easy to forget that you’re in Manhattan when you’re surrounded by nature and very few people. Very few of the city noises permeated the woods other than the soft buzz of passenger cars on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

My favorite shot of the day, peeking out at the George Washington Bridge from Fort Tryon Park.

We ended up walking about 5 miles and caught up with Matt the whole way. This is the sort of special time I appreciate more and more!

We then took a short subway ride back to Riverdale. We packed up and drove back into Manhattan to get the banana pudding that eluded us yesterday! We picked it up on our way to Jersey for lunch..

For lunch I was searching for a great Reuben since I tried one for the first time in MA for St Patrick’s Day and it was excellent. NY and NJ are know for great delis so it became a goal. I found place called Harold’s New York Deli restaurant in Edison, NJ, south of Newark on I-95. We found it, a huge sprawling building.. very un-deli-like, and sat down. We quickly learned the theme of Harold’s- The Biggest! The restaurant itself is huge, but so are all of the dishes.. and they have a lot of different foods. To our surprise, their prices are also the biggest! It’s hard to find a sandwich under $40. We figured we must be missing something, but it turned out that we really had to hunt to get single-person meals, and even then we spent $65 on lunch for the two of us.

I must have pulled out half of the meat to make it manageable, and it was still gigantic. Fortunately it was also delicious, so we ate most of the meat on the side. They also had an included all-you-can-eat pickle bar.. which was odd but good. It had pickles of course, but also sauerkraut, salad, rolls, and muffins. I was able to use spiced pickle chips and sauerkraut alongside the Russian dressing and mustard to dress up my corned beef into a Reuben (without the cheese, which I really didn’t need). YUM!

Then.. back to the car to eat our Magnolia treats! We had the banana pudding (ok technically I had already spoon-fed Ashok some of this on our way because it sounded so good 🤣) and a couple cupcakes. The banana pudding is a perfect mix of creamy banana.. crème, fresh banana slices, and fresh wafers. It all really went well together!

We got to our AirBnB in Philadelphia while it was still light. Ahh..