I Saw a Unicorn and Got My Playbill Signed By the Gods in New York City

New York City is a crazy place. Why is there everything that you'd ever want to see or do there, and it's all easily accessible via public transportation? And people just LIVE there like that's a completely normal way to exist!!! 

A place like Indiana must seem absolutely fucking miserable to a New Yorker. When a New Yorker is bored, they can go get cheap dumplings or ride the subway somewhere cool or visit a museum or go to a show or just walk around and people watch. When I'm bored, I have to resort to stupid shit like poking around in my garden or taking the dog for a hike or wandering around the mall and not buying stuff. Our lives are NOT the same.

Ah, well. One more full day to pretend to be a real New Yorker by doing all the touristy, non-New Yorker things I can fit into the schedule!

On this day, after the obligatory bagels for breakfast (you put too much cream cheese on your bagels, New York!), my partner polled the kids to see if they'd rather go see Stonewall National Monument or the unicorn tapestries. I think they'd have loved both, but unicorns were the winners this time. 

We'll pay our respects next time, Stonewall!

The Met Cloisters was quite the hike from our Times Square-adjacent hotel, but I think it might be my favorite place in New York City. Y'all know what a freak I am for the Medieval period (if you want me to send you Margery Kempe memes message me your cell number!), and here was a lovely little museum simply chock-full of Medieval and ONLY Medieval art! 

I'm especially fond of Medieval depictions of critters, such as this completely realistic lion that the artist has definitely seen before:

Spanish, Castile-Leon, circa 1200. My favorite part is its mustache!

Also, a dragon that is literally eating a guy!

North German, circa 1200

Another dragon, but this one's got chicken feet and a very sassy expression on its face:

Spanish, Castile-Leon, circa 1200

We apparently don't quite know what the deal is with this particular two-headed critter, just that William of Orange is stabbing it:

There are two types of museum-goers in my family. The first type looks at everything really fast and then sits around, bored, and contemplates killing the rest of us. Thank goodness for my museum buddy who's also of the second type!

We look at EVERYTHING. AND we read its label. And we take each other's pictures looking at the best stuff so we can prove we were there. 

King Arthur!

This is supposed to be either Hector of Troy or Alexander the Great.

I also like Medieval manuscripts:

The Romance of the Rose, French, 1340

This stained glass window apparently used to live in Canterbury Cathedral!

Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, 1180

But here's what we really came to see:

The Unicorn Defends Himself

These were astounding, although I wish the unicorn would have kicked those hunters' asses rather than getting killed. I love how it's depicted as A Definitely Real Unicorn That Really Exists, and in the corner of the gallery was also displayed a narwhal tooth, which I would certainly have 100% believed was a real unicorn horn if nobody had told me about narwhals.

I'm so curious about this mending. It's very visible, so perhaps it's also historic, or perhaps it was done purposefully so you could see the evidence of historical wear:

The Hunters Return to the Castle

The peaceful scenes are the best, though. Fuck those hunters!

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden

The Unicorn Purifies Water

Love this guy:

As the other two were finally dragging the big kid and I by our ears out of the museum, my partner said, "I wonder if anyone ever comes here twice?", thinking, I guess, about how out-of-the-way and very much up-the-hill it is. But I swear that if I lived here I'd come to the Met Cloisters every day just to say hi to the unicorns, maybe take a little peek at St. Michael slaying the demons, sneak into a guided tour or two, and then head back down the hill and down the block for this huge slice of pizza that was so freaking delicious and I swear to god it cost four dollars:

Sufficiently fueled, we took the subway back downtown and back to this Times Square-adjacent location just cattycorner from our hotel, because no matter that I'd already seen unicorns and eaten pizza--my day was about to get even better!

This trip was the coming together of a couple of dreams. Y'all already know that I love musicals, and that Hadestown has long been my favorite by far. Y'all don't need me to start waxing tearfully poetic about how meaningful I find this work of art that celebrates the beauty of knowing that your efforts are futile, but nevertheless trying as hard as you can. You don't need to do something because you think you'll win--you just need to do it because it's the right thing to do. Also, the beauty of telling the same story over and over, even if you don't like the ending, because the meaning isn't in the ending--it's in the telling. 

Ugh, you guys, I just love Hadestown so much.

And currently, the little kid's favorite actor is playing Orpheus. How could we pass up a chance for her to see Jack Wolfe in person, and for me to see Hadestown again, and for the other two to also come and hang out with us in New York City?

Money comes back, but life is made of memories:

Jack Wolfe didn't come out to the admittedly absolutely madhouse-level stagedoor afterwards, which was a bummer but omg COMPLETELY understandable, because OMG that crowd! However, we were super excited to see Paulo Szot--

--and Kurt Elling--

--and Allison Russell--

--which means that we got our playbills signed by all the gods!

Interestingly, the news just dropped last week that this cast's final performance of Hadestown is March 1. As the little kid and I were talking about it, I theorized that wouldn't it be cool if Jack Wolfe was headed back to the West End, where The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is now running. Wolfe played The Balladeer in a previous run of the show, and I joked that if he ended up as The Balladeer again I'd have to start looking for plane tickets.

"You wouldn't go without me?!?", the kid gasped.

Money comes back, but life is made of memories!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 2 in New Zealand: A Whole Day with the Hobbits

Want to know what an absolutely peak breakfast in New Zealand looks like? It looks like this!

That's a microwaved savory pie from the Newmarket grocery store, instant coffee, and some Whittaker's Hokey Pokey. Basically the same thing that I had for dinner the night before, but then I substituted Scrumpy for the coffee, ahem.

Now, onto Hobbiton!

In all of New Zealand, the prettiest thing I saw was sheep grazing on a hill:

Much of the North Island was clear-cut to make pastureland for them, and everywhere we drove, often on both sides of the road, there were hills full of sheep. Usually some would even picturesquely silhouette themselves on the hilltop for our special enjoyment. 

They don't photograph especially well, alas, at least not for me, but they were inevitably charming and delightful, and are my favorite thing about New Zealand.

This, though, is probably my partner's favorite thing about New Zealand, and for good reason:

I told you before that I wasn't real sure about the part where you can only visit Hobbiton via a guided tour, and I was less sure after seeing the size of the tour bus, and therefore tour group, we'd be with:

But actually it was awesome! The tour groups were far enough apart that I could take photos without anyone in the background, something that never would have been possible if we'd all been set free to wander at will:

So please pardon me, because I DO need you to see every single photo of every single lovely hobbit hole we visited:

Spring has to be the perfect time to visit Hobbiton. All the flowers were in bloom, so much so that you couldn't see some of the hobbit holes behind their owners' verdant blossoms. The weather also could not have been more perfect:

The entire place is set-designed to look like a busy hobbit village. It's a little disconcerting in that everything is left exactly as it would be if all the inhabitants had recently been Raptured--

--but, again, you can't say that it's not charming!

Our tour guide took this photo of the vista, including the adjacent farmlands--I imagine that getting to play with other people's cameras adds a little bit of fun to the process of taking forty tourist's photos in the doorway of the same hobbit hole five times a day:

There isn't actually an "inside" to these hobbit holes, but I love how all the smoking chimneys and busy windows set into the hillside make them look like there's a whole household inside every single one:

And of course, at the very top of the tallest hill is the most famous hobbit hole of all:

Every detail is book-perfect!

You can't really tell from my photos, but depending on where we were on the hillside, the hobbit holes were built to different sizes. Some are 100% human scale for the actors playing hobbits to interact with, some are 90% human scale, which I think is so the dwarves can look at little outsized(? Please correct me if I'm wrong, because I SUPER want to know!), and some are 60% human scale, which is for the actors playing humans to interact with, as the average hobbit is 60% the size of the average human. I think these next few hobbit holes are the 60% ones:

But you can't really tell from the photos, right, because regardless of the size, all the details are perfect!

Here's where Bilbo celebrated his eleventy-first birthday party. I, personally, wasn't really on the tour for its movie set-ness, but rather its book set-ness, but we still got lots of good gossip about what it was like to film the party scene here, including the secret ingredient to keeping small children party-wild over the course of an overnight film shoot: SUGAR!

And here we are making our way past the outskirts of Hobbiton and on towards the Green Dragon:

I don't really understand how they keep all these details looking so lovely out in the weather. The outdoor stuff looks appropriately worn, but little details like books left open on benches and newspapers inside mailboxes look perfect!

At the edge of town is a 90%-scale hobbit hole you can actually go inside, with book-accurate set dressing that makes it look exactly like the home of a busy, well-to-do hobbit family that just got Raptured.

Also, it turns out that I, too, am 90% scale, because I was perfectly comfortable here:

Lol at the emergency exit sign!

Now, time for a drink at the Green Dragon!

This view from the Green Dragon, across the pond and back towards Hobbiton, gives you a nice perspective of many of the hobbit holes, differently sized but still looking correctly proportioned to the viewer:

I don't know if you'd enjoy it if you didn't know the books, but I thought the whole place was absolutely enchanting.

DEVASTATED that this dish in the cafe was not named "Second Breakfast," however. Such a lost opportunity...


Pro tip for international travel destinations: if you want to encourage your most frugal travelers to buy souvenirs, get your airline that flies there to give them a free checked bag. I bought hardly anything in England last year, on account of we brought only carry-ons, but Air New Zealand gave us each a free checked bag, and so somehow this turned me into a cartoon version of myself, just absolutely tossing money at cashiers and filling my bag with chocolate bars and books and a Hobbiton hoodie and ciders and Jaffa cakes and yet more books. Don't tell the kids, but they're each getting an awesome illustrated copy of The Hobbit for Christmas! To be honest, I also really wanted a copy for myself, but presenting THREE identical copies of the exact same book to the cashier just felt like one copy too crazy, you know?

Even with eating lunch at the Shire's Rest Cafe and looking at every single thing in the gift shop twice, we had more time than we thought we would after Hobbiton. On the beautiful drive back to Auckland--

--my partner reminded me of the signs we'd seen at the Auckland waterfront the day before advertising a Lord of the Rings musical. Was it playing that night, he wondered?

It was!

Could we get tickets at the door, we wondered?

This was one of the best things we did in New Zealand. Y'all KNOW how I feel about musicals, and yet for whatever reason, I had no idea that this musical even existed! I don't know what the other productions might look like, but this Auckland production was chaotically, delightfully unhinged. The set looked sweet and homey--

--and at about 20 minutes until showtime I was just about to turn my phone off and put it away, when all of a sudden the cast came out in character and proceeded to go absolutely feral in the audience:

It was bonkers and hysterical, Gollum was like a circus creature but also weirdly hot(?), and by the time the show was over I was exhausted from joy.

The show itself wasn't the best musical production I've ever seen--there are serious pacing problems, most of the songs did nothing to forward the plot, a few parts were decidedly corny, and Galadriel gets way too much stage time--but it will absolutely remain one of the most fun musical productions I've ever seen.

Which actually does kind of make it one of the best!

As fun as it was, by the time the show was over I was about ready to lie down on the sidewalk and die, I was so tired, so before we left our downtown parking spot my partner parked me inside the rental car and ran across the road and got us Domino's, of all things. Thank goodness our hotel parking wasn't the nightmarish hellscape it was the previous night, so 20 minutes later I was in my pajamas eating pizza and Scrumpy in bed and staring befuddled-like at rugby on the TV.

Forty minutes later, I was sound asleep!

Tomorrow, I see the BEST thing in all of New Zealand: my daughter!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!