But it’s been two weeks now, and I’m really ready for this mini-vacation to come to an end. I love the cats, and the place is as beautiful as ever, but there’s something about Tribeca that gets to me. I’d never spent much time in the neighborhood before, and now I know why. Sure, there’s a certain (small… very small) rush one gets peering out the window of sitting at ‘wichcraft and seeing Dennis Leary pedal by on his bicycle, but that’s really no substitute for what the neighborhood lacks. Despite its beautiful historic buildings and narrow, winding cobblestone alleys, Tribeca is missing the energy that one finds in other, similarly scenic New York neighborhoods.

Tribeca fills the gap between the Financial District and SoHo, and does so in just the way one might imagine. Having diluted the “hipness” of SoHo—if it can still be called that—so as to make it palatable for the financial types a few blocks down on Wall Street, the cobblestone streets of Tribeca are lined with restaurants that, for the most part, are expensive purely because they can be. They’re the kind of places a guy might take his date just to show her he can afford it. Maybe there’s a premium for using the word “Bistro” in your name, and I guess the overhead on tight black t-shirts for all those servers must be pretty high. Or maybe whatever magic they’re doing to that brown butter sage sauce is really worth it, but having tried one of the more moderately priced of these restaurants (one with a good reputation, even), I kind of doubt it.

I have a love/hate relationship with my own neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Among New Yorkers, Park Slope is mostly known as a breeding ground for hyper-PC thirtysomethings. I like to say it’s where hipsters go to die. The neighborhood is epitomized by the Tea Lounge, a kid-friendly coffee shop with daytime children’s song singalongs, and the Park Slope Food Coop, which has a reputation for fantastic produce and a Stalinist member base. Given my extremely close proximity to both of these institutions, I am truly in the nexus of the Park Slope storm. This is at once wonderfully convenient and tremendously irritating.

Sometimes the myriad of strollers (and the self-righteous parents pushing them) gets me down, and as a member of the Coop, I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with kooky socialists. But there’s more to Park Slope than that. There are good restaurants and bars, Prospect Park, trees along the streets, historic brownstown buildings, and stoops—beautiful stoops on which I’ve whiled away countless hours watching people—dog-walking, stroller-pushing, organic-Swiss-chard-eating, Coop-membership- having people.

Staying in Tribeca has renewed my love of Brooklyn and Park Slope. I love Manhattan, but the college feel of the East Village just isn’t for me anymore, SoHo feels too trendy, and Tribeca has the beautiful old buildings and quaint streets but all the enthusiasm of a GM shareholders meeting. It’s a nice place to visit, but right now at least, I’m glad I don’t live there.

There wasn’t much to see, but we got out of the car and looked around anyway. Gigantic candy canes and reindeer carousels taunted us from the other side of the amusement park’s dilapidated fences, while what was surely a sleigh-styled roller coaster wound around the trees overhead. Paintings of happy dancing elves adorned the buildings, which themselves looked straight out of the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer television special. I could almost hear the park’s ubiquitous soundtrack blaring from the speakers high overhead. On second thought, I was kind of glad it was closed.

“At least get a picture of me next to the sign.” It was hardly the kind of campy eccentricity we were sure to have found within the gates of Santaland, but it would have to do. Matt ran back to the car for the camera, but in accordance with our overall luck at what was fast becoming our personal, Christmas-themed hell, the camera’s battery had gone dead. Son. of. a. bitch.

But everybody knows that you don’t drive an hour and a half off the highway on winding two lane roads in the middle of nowhere to not get your picture taken at Santaland. No, we would not accept defeat. Matt plugged the battery into the charger, and we waited, walking in slow circles around the parking lot. As the blue light of dusk slowly began to fall, the park’s surreal atmosphere and intense emptiness transformed the place from kitschy to just plain creepy. Santa’s welcoming smile became more menacing with each passing moment, and Matt and I both grew impatient. We cursed the camera. We cursed Santa. We laughed uncomfortably as the occasional car drove by, certain that its occupants were staring coldly at the two idiots standing awkwardly in the big empty parking lot. Finally, we took our pictures. I don’t think they were worth the wait.

And so we kept driving, further into Cherokee, in search of something–anything–worth seeing. Descending into the valley, deeper into the mountains and further away from the comfort of the familiar interstate, we were swallowed by the thick bucolic landscape, and the roads became tunnels all wrapped up in trees. Emerging from the greenery, a bright purple sign announced “The World’s Largest Game of Bingo” at some place called Tribal Bingo. I’m not sure how one determines the largest game of bingo, but neither of us were curious enough to find out. We kept driving.

As a night fog settled below the mountaintops, we passed fruit stands and run-down shacks leaning against huge lots of rusting old cars. With every bend, over every hill, the ironic humor of Santaland and Tribal Bingo faded into the distance, until one more turn, when we finally found what we were looking for. Signs, a dozen or more, glowed in the dusk sky of the empty old town, each marking another motel straight out of a decade long past–buzzing neon signs flickering “VACANCY” just as they had forty years ago, resting against a deep green backdrop of rolling hills.

Below the signs were charmingly anachronistic U-shaped buildings of the same era, cars scattered about their parking lots. I imagined a disinterested kid, or maybe an old man, the same one who’s run the place for the past four decades, sitting back in a rolling chair behind the counter, checking his list of rooms as keys dangle from old hooks on the wall. I thought of that first look around the room, its musty air escaping as the door creeps open. I pictured lone travelers, carelessly dropping their bags on the floor before collapsing onto the bed, sighing deeply as they settled in for the night.

We snapped a few pictures, and turned back toward the main highway, hoping to make it there before daylight had completely vanished.

Instead of celebrating the new year amongst friends or family, I spent the final minutes of 2004 in a nearly vacant 767 en route to Paris. Flight attendants handed out plastic cups of champagne as the captain counted down the seconds to 2005 over the PA. There were multilingual cheers throughout the plane as we all raised our little cups in the air to toast the new year.

More about France later. For now, you can see the pictures.

In June, to kick off “Freedom Summer 2004,” Matt and I embarked upon the Carpetbagger Tour, which would take us through the Dirty South and into Memphis, TN. Wanna see pictures? Go here.