John and Val Hewins and I went to New York City today and caught the train out of Hamilton Station. We took Hamilton to Penn Station, Penn Station to Grand Central, and Grand Central to the New York City Botanical Gardens. On each of these stints I got to either listen to an audiobook or sleep and I gained a new appreciation for not needing to entertain married couples.

Val was a delight to watch at the Gardens as she has the keen mind of trained scientist. She would find a plant with some interesting mechanism and reason backwards why it was that way based on the biological and environmental forces placed on the plant. As Dawkins points out it is not the case that biology makes sense with evolution but biology only makes sense with evolution.

After the Gardens we hit some key sites and wandered south for ramen at Minca Ramen. I asked if we could go to the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop and they hesitantly agreed. When we got there, Val was surprised “wow, it’s actually called the Big Gay Ice Cream shop. I thought you were just being… you.”

Throughout the day I became aware that I walked much faster than Val and John such that were were three minutes late to everything. We were in no rush and their company was nice so it proved to be no bother. Another benefit of John and Val was that we seemed to all enjoy kind of just drinking in our surroundings but wanted to make conversation so we had long stretches of silence punctuated with commentary on what we had just seen since our last silence break.

Rest of the pictures:

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