New York, New York.

The Brooklyn Bridge, which spans the East River, connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City. The unique bridge design opened in 1883 as the world’s longest suspension bridge. Its innovative construction was the first to use steel wire for cables and pneumatic caissons for underwater supports.

We arrived in New York City two days before boarding our ship for a cruise along Canada’s eastern provinces. As I’ve commented before, with today’s airline schedule snafus, we scheduled to arrive early. We used to show up one day early. Now, we show up two days ahead of the departure day. The change adds an extra night in a hotel in the departure city, but it allows us a full day of sightseeing, and sometimes more than that.

We visited several places that day and took a Hudson River cruise. We aimed to visit Liberty Island and get closer to the Statue of Liberty. As we neared the piers, we were stopped by several vendors offering tours of all types. We let one talk us into their “Three-Hour cruise” that lasted less than an hour. The vendor told us we wouldn’t actually get off the boat at Liberty Island, but we would see the statue up close from the boat and see much more of New York than being on the island standing in line. We had a nice cruise; it was shorter than expected, and we learned that we should never have purchased a ticket from one of the street vendors.

Another scam also costs tourists an extra $50 a person for those taking the ferry to Liberty Island to watch out for. We might have fallen for this one had we decided to take the ferry to the island. Scammers appearing to work for the ferry company sell tickets for $50, the going price, but when the tourist takes the ticket to the gate, they learn the ticket is not valid and have to buy an actual ticket from the park staff. See this article here for details. All in all, don’t purchase tickets from street vendors. Be sure you are getting what you paid for. I will share more photos of our Hudson River Cruise in an upcoming post.

About the photo: Though I used my Sony point-and-shoot for most of the pictures on the cruise, I also used my Samsung S23U, knowing I would need some images for Cellpic Sunday posts. The image didn’t require much editing. After Lightroom Classic tweaks, I sent it to Luminar Neo for a touch of Enhance AI. That’s about it.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s also acceptable. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner