Around the end of November, I went into NY City to have a pre-Christmas lunch with a friend and former colleague.

I started my journey at my local train station: Scarborough. The station is right on the Hudson River and there’s a path leading from the car park to the station that allows access to the riverbank. I was a little early, so I walked around taking pictures of anything I found interesting along this path.

Next stop Grand Central Terminal where I took a few pictures before taking the short walk along Park Avenue to our chosen restaurant: The Park Avenue Tavern.

After the meal I made my way back to Grand Central, taking pictures of Christmas lights along the way.

Since my train was not scheduled to leave for a while, I took some more pictures inside Grand Central and then headed home.

Above: The very beginning of the journey: The Palisades as seen from Scarborough Metro North Station. For anyone who doesn’t know what the Palisades are, Wikipedia describes them as follows:

The Palisades, also called the New Jersey Palisades or the Hudson River Palisades, are a line of steep cliffs along the west side of the lower Hudson River in Northeastern New Jersey and Southeastern New York in the United States. The cliffs stretch north from Jersey City about 20 miles (32 km) to near Nyack, New York, and are visible at Haverstraw, New York. They rise nearly vertically from near the edge of the river, and are about 300 feet (90 m) high at Weehawken, increasing gradually to 540 feet (160 m) high near their northern terminus. North of Fort Lee, the Palisades are part of Palisades Interstate Park and are a National Natural Landmark.

The Palisades are among the most dramatic geologic features in the vicinity of New York City, forming a canyon of the Hudson north of the George Washington Bridge, as well as providing a vista of the Manhattan skyline. They sit in the Newark Basin, a rift basin located mostly in New Jersey.

Palisade is derived from the same root as the word pole, ultimately from the Latin word palus, meaning stake. A “palisade” is, in general, a defensive fence or wall made up of wooden stakes or tree trunks. The Lenape called the cliffs “rocks that look like rows of trees”, a phrase that became “Weehawken”, the name of a town in New Jersey that sits at the top of the cliffs across from Midtown Manhattan.

I didn’t feel like carrying around much camera gear, so I dug out my old Sony Nex 5N and Sony E 16mm f2.8. Maybe not as fully featured as my newer cameras, but an extremely small and light combination.

Taken with a Sony Nex 5n and Sony E 16mm f2.8