I could never live in the NYC. Too intense, too crowded, for a suburban SoCal kid.

But for a day or three? Yeah. NYC can be a rush.

My daughter and I did a week in an afternoon today, or so it seemed.

We took the train up from Princeton on a warm and sultry afternoon, and after about 75 minutes we were at Penn Station. Not having a real plan, we struck out north in the direction of Central Park. We would see what we would see en route, and then look around, and come back. As simple as that.

On the way, we went through Times Square (where the NYPD had a fatal encounter with a knife-wielding man about 45 minutes later), realized Seventh Avenue had become Broadway, and considered the notion of having seen a musical if we had planned a little better. And which would we have seen? Probably The Book of Mormon.

It was warm, and muggy, and we were ready to sit for a while once we hit Central Park, which was teeming with activity. We watched the hansom cabs roll past (speculating on the lives of the horses) and the joggers and bikers, and heard a dozen languages.

Having lived abroad for nearly three years now, in the UAE, I found myself fascinated by the softball games, something both familiar and (now) exotic, and the really intense old guys playing — with the occasional female teammate. Above, I pause as another game unfolds behind us, with the trees of the park and the skyline of NYC forming the background.

We were probably a little dehydrated by then, and hungry as well, when we stopped at the Ballfields Cafe. A tuna sandwich, nachos, a lot of lemonade, and we were up for the next part of the day. We exited Central Park (which always impresses me with its size and range of activities) at the southeast corner, and found ourselves on Fifth Avenue, maybe still the global zenith of high-end shopping.

We started with a half hour inside FAO Schwarz, the famed toy store (that is Britt, below, posing with a near-lifesize elephant in the enormous plush-toy area), and we didn’t get out without dropping $50 on a plush leopard head — one you hang on the wall like a hunter might. (And invent some silly story about having bagged the brute with your last shot while on safari in Tanzania.)

Fifth Avenue was a mass of tourists, moving up both sides of the street, and we fought our way through — carrying the enormous FAO Schwarz bag with the fake leopard head. (And off to our right, on Seventh Avenue, we could see police activity, and an ambulance, that had to do with the police shooting.) We noticed many streets barricaded, and eventually learned that a triathlon had been contested in the city earlier in the day.

We were pretty much fried by the time we had walked back to Penn Station, and were happy to get inside the air-conditioned (albeit packed) train back to Jersey.

A lot of sights, a lot of sounds, stuff happening around us, chats about what it might be like to live in an apartment overlooking Central Park … but happy to get back to the quiet, small-town life that is Princeton, N.J.