A Breakfast Thwarted Becomes A Walking Photo Tour

Sunday morning dawned cloudy and dreary, but I rushed through my chores because I had decided to go have breakfast at the Miss Albany Diner. I recently posted about the diner (see here) and said it appeared to me to have gone out of business. A friend emailed me to say that it was very much alive but closes each day at 2:00. So I wanted to go have breakfast there. I drove across the Hudson River to Albany and stopped briefly at the giant tulip, directly across the road from the giant dancers (see here). Albany is a Dutch city and tulips are important, with hundreds of thousands of them planted each year (210,000 last year) and a whole festival devoted to them. So I set my camera on a post and took my own picture:

And then I drove to the Albany City Diner. It is a beloved Albany Landmark, on the list of historic sites and featured in the movie, "Ironweed.":

But the diner was closed. I noted that it didn't open until 9:00 and I was an hour early. So I took a few photos:

I made it a point to photograph the cow's head above the diner. And then I drove away, thinking I'd go home and forget the whole thing:

But when I returned to the site of the giant tulip, I changed my mind and decided this would be a great opportunity to take pictures of Albany. Across the road from the tulip you will see the giant dancers statue and the Federal Building. The building with the lighted marquee on the left is the Palace Theater. Something was happening there that Sunday morning because parents and children were entering it in droves and the children were carrying duffel-bags and backpacks:

I took one more photo of the giant tulip:

And then began walking up toward the Palace Theater:

When I'd last photographed the giant dancers, the snow was too deep for me to get a shot from any angle except from the street. But this time I walked to the other side to snap a photo:

I could find no place to set my camera so that I could get in the picture to give you a sense of scale, but I did walk over and check my height against the dancers. The top of my head was slightly below the man's knees:

By then I was on a roll, so I began walking toward downtown Albany along Pearl Street. The first notable building was First Church, but I'll post more about that tomorrow: