This week, I took a trip with Hugo, Sterling and Sebastian to Belvedere Castle in Central Park. I’m trying to prioritize free field trips this year, and get us outside while the weather is still nice - it’s still warm, but I’m a New Yorker and I know what comes next.

Belvedere Castle is a an actual miniature castle in the middle of Central Park, designed by the park’s architects to offer a vista of the surrounding park-and-city-scape. It’s also (fun fact!) the place where the weather is measured - I like to be able to picture the place whenever I hear “the weather in Central Park is…”. I’d been as a kid, but it has been many years since I went back.

We left school around 10 and set off across the park, enjoying the sunshine, talking about Harry Potter and Trinidad and what makes a bad swingset. It took us about an hour to get there, past the reservoir, only stopping once at a disappointing playground. The castle is right next to the Turtle Pond, Delecourt Theatre and the Shakespeare Garden - the theatre is shuttered for the season but there was a jazz trio playing outside.

The castle is very cute but crowded - there’s only one very narrow staircase to get up to the roof, where the good view is. It winds up two flights, and is so steep and tight that people can only travel single-file, which means that traffic alternates between going up and going down. And people there were - the whole place was packed with tourists, speaking a multitude of languages. We got stuck on the stairs going up as people pushed past us (an unpleasant and claustrophobic experience), but we did finally make it to the top to take some photos and enjoy the view. When time came to head back down, Sebastian (understandably) got a bit freaked out about the prospect of going back into the stairs. With time and the help of some kindly Spanish tourists, we made it back down. During the extra time we spent on the roof deck, we spotted a red-tailed hawk circling close overhead, so really things turned out for the best.

Overall, I’d say it was a fun field trip, but mostly because of the park walk and not the destination. Central Park on a beautiful October day is the thrumming heart of the city - castle or no castle it’s worth a trip.

[Sterling and Hugo sitting on a stone wall, the Turtle Pond and baseball fields of central park behind them, and the city skyline in the distance.]