{"id":2028,"date":"2011-06-07T12:43:40","date_gmt":"2011-06-07T16:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janetgover.com\/?p=2028"},"modified":"2011-06-07T12:43:40","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T16:43:40","slug":"romantic-novelists-on-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/my-travels\/romantic-novelists-on-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Romantic Novelists on Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>
A tenement room (photo courtesy The Tenement Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Playing tourist is fun \u2013 playing tourist in the company of a historical novelist is even better!<\/p>\n

My good friend Jean Fullerton \u2013 who writes fabulous historical novels <\/a>\u2013 came for a visit and we went on tour. I always love playing tour guide for a friend. It always makes me look at things through new eyes. It’s so much more fun when those eyes have the sort of knowledge behind them that Jean uses when she’s writing.<\/p>\n

Our first stop was the tenement museum.<\/p>\n

This is a building that was condemned decades ago and the people just left it. When some historians\u00a0finally entered it, they found a time capsule which opens the door on the way migrants lived when they first arrived in New York a century or more ago.<\/p>\n

You can only visit the museum <\/a>with a guide. The guides are so knowledgeable \u2013 telling stories about the people who lived in the tenement at different times in its history.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Tenement Museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In one of the apartments, we saw where a little girl who lived there had written her name on the wallpaper in pencil. It is faded but still survives. Her mother must have been angry at her for defacing their wallpaper \u2013 but for us, it was quite a touching moment.<\/p>\n

Even more so was the front room of another apartment, which was set up as if had been for the funeral of a baby girl who died\u00a0after drinking the poisonous swill milk that was all the poor garment workers had to feed their babies. I don’t think I was alone in the sadness I felt for the poor mother who thought she was helping her baby, when in fact she was killing her.<\/p>\n

The tour touched on the terrible conditions on the sweat shops of the era, but it wasn’t all sad \u2013 some of the migrants who lived in the terrible tenements did achieve their dreams of a better life in the new world.<\/p>\n

We almost literally stumbled across a fabulous place by the piers in the East River \u2013 where another time capsule was waiting for us.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Peking - moored in the East River<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This was the barque Peking \u2013 one of the last of the great sailing ships \u2013 preserved now as a museum<\/a>. Peking and her sister ships plied difficult routes between the old world and South America \u2013 routes that were not viable for steam ships.<\/p>\n

The sailors who manned her did so in the traditional fashion \u2013 working four hours on and four off, 24 hours a day seven days a week for a voyage that would last three months or more. Looking up at the tall masts, I wondered how on earth the sailors could have climbed up there \u2013 and clung on \u2013 as she fought the treacherous waters and great storms around Cape Horn.<\/p>\n

Those sailors must have been pretty tough!<\/p>\n

A romantic novelist on tour is a pretty tough beast too \u2013 \u00a0we avoided the paps (who might not actually have been waiting for us \u2013 but you<\/p>\n

\"They<\/a>
They must have been told there were romantic novelists nearby<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

never know) and made it to Macy’s.<\/p>\n

For some reason, the store had decided to put some racing cars in the middle of the ladies handbags and accessories.<\/p>\n

That seemed a strange idea at first \u2013 but it did give the men something to do while the woman shopped.<\/p>\n

It was a fabulous week on tour \u2013 Empire State Building, The Metropolitan Museum and New York’s finest men in uniform (in town for Memorial Day). Both of us came away full of ideas\u2026 after all, it was a research trip. Honestly!<\/p>\n

\"Racing<\/a>
Racing car at Macy's<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing tourist is fun \u2013 playing tourist in the company of a historical novelist is even better! My good friend Jean Fullerton \u2013 who writes fabulous historical novels \u2013 came for a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-travels","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}