What is it that drives so many tourists, once they’ve paid the exorbitant costs to get to New York and house themselves, to go to dinner at the Olive Garden? It’s something I’ll never understand.

I had a similar thought the other day as we were waiting to board the Pioneer, the South Street Seaport Museum’s 1885 steel-hull schooner. I’ve blogged about the Pioneer elsewhere and even wrote about it for my first post here last fall; I won’t go into  too many details again.

But let me just say that on our sunny afternoon public sail we had only 6 passengers on the boat. (It holds  only 40 passengers max.) Meanwhile, a group of day campers in screaming loud tie-dye swarmed on board the obnoxious Shark one pier over, and right next to us hundreds of European tourists (and the few midwesterners who are braving the city this summer) waddled on board the Zephyr as if it were Noah’s Ark. I don’t know how many passengers the Shark holds, but the Zephyr can take up to 600!

Why would anyone choose to restrict themselves to a narrow seat, crammed in with a million other people, only to float around so removed from the water that you feel like you’re merely watching this all pass by on TV? Is this part of reality culture, that we want our real experiences to feel as if they’re on screen?

I’ll take a splash of the water over the side and help hoist my own sails anytime.

To find out more about sailing on the Pioneer click here.

p.s. Eliasson’s waterfalls? Completely underwhelming. How can they not be stacked up against the Brooklyn Bridge or the skyline itself?