Its All about Parks

Park for a Day

February 12th, 2009 -- Posted in Park for a Day | Comments

The rush of the city life in New York can get jostling for most. For a heart-to-heart with nature and one of the prettiest sights that the city has to offer, one can take a walk down the Hudson River. What can be even more of a treat is a walk through the Hudson River Park, alongside the river, enjoying the beauty of the river and the serenity of nature.

The park is mostly famous for the different recreational facilities that it provides, which includes organized sporting events or leisure activities and even fun activities for children to enjoy. The best feature about the Park is its long, almost five mile bike riding pathway that run’s along the whole length of the park.  There is also a similar path for runners and other pedestrians.

The Park is thus ideal for spending a day released from the usual daily grind. The park is scattered with a range of courts and fields for different kinds of sports to be enjoyed. The park boasts of its very own soccer field, basketball and tennis courts, children’s playgrounds, skating grounds and a dog run. The park also provides for recreational piers at the Watergates, here there are places to fish for free along with other activities such as rowing and building of boats. There is also a very active Water Taxi stop here. You could also bring your dog for a day out here, as near the pier there is one of the best dog-runs in the city, and also for those with an empty stomach, a restaurant to fill your appetite. On the roof of one of the Piers, the New York Trapeze School operates. The largest of all the sporting complexes inside the Hudson River Park, is the Chelsea Piers Sporting Complex, holding a vast range of athletic grounds. This includes an immensely popular batting cage, an ice skating rink, driving grounds, gymnastic floors and best of all – rock climbing spaces. The premises also include other outdoor activities such as boating facilities and casual restaurants. The Hudson River Park has a long time heritage connected to the river and in keeping with this; there are special piers where canoeing, sailing and kayaking opportunities are provided.

Lastly, for those looking for some non – athletic leisure, there are perfect open and grassy spaces for just lazing around and acquiring the perfect tan.

A Larger Than Life Experience

May 21st, 2008 -- Posted in The Park | Comments

If you are a fan of escaping into nature with no human to bother you as you probe through the flora and the fauna around you, the Northeast Greenland National Park, may just be an ideal spot for a vacation. It not only gives you a reason to visit Greenland, a beautiful country in itself, but it also provides for good tales to take back home from the largest National Park in the world. It has also been declared to be an international biosphere reserve park.

Stretching over an area of 972,000 kilometers, the park is larger than over a hundred countries combined and covers the entire northeastern coastline and the interior parts of that section of Greenland. The large interiors of the park is part of the ice sheets of Greenland, so what you will see is nature surviving in bitter cold, however, there are also ice free parts of the park, located along the coast and also the northern section. The park was originally created in 1974 from the uninhabited area of Tunu in East in Greenland, but it was eventually expanded to the present size it boasts of in 1988 by including the area of Avannaa located on the North in Greenland.

Human population is practically non existent here. The last time it was studied in 1986, the local human population was counted to be only about forty people, although some locations were populated by local tribes to some extent during the summer months. The forty who actually lived constantly in the park were the ones who were responsible for maintaining the cleanliness of the park and also participated at the mining exploration sites. However, many left and the number of humans in the park has thus reduced even more.

The beauty of this national park lies in its untouched animal life. It is estimated that at least five to fifteen thousand musk oxen, walruses and polar bears live inside the park; most of these can be spotted near the costal areas of the park. The place is also a great venue for some bird watching of the rare kind. There are all types of birds that breed here, from the Barnacle Geese to the Pink-footed Geese and the Snowy Owl and Great Northern Diver.

The park is the perfect example for a getaway into the wild and to experience nature in its rarest kind.