stunt_muppet

I opened a can of worms in the process of writing Chapter 3 of The Sixth-Date Rule - I had Marisol ask about New York. It seemed a natural direction for the conversation to take, given that Marisol has presumeably never been to New York.

Of course, being the forethinking genius that I am, I then had her ask about the New York that Horatio knew, the New York that wasn't in the tourist pamphlets. I had her ask what else there was.

Which means that I had to know what else there was. Given that I've never set foot in the state of New York except this one time when I was four, this was a problem. 

So, a few days of research and a bit of poking around later, I found a couple of places that, while not totally unknown/obscure, were at least not on the Wikipedia page for Manhattan. A bar here, a restaurant there...

Of course, in order to know where Horatio would stop for dinner or an after-work beer, I'd have to know which precinct he worked, and exactly where that was, and which establishments would still have been around in 1985-ish, and which of those would have been safe/reputable/used to serving cops. I'm not sure if I felt like doing that much work for an offhand mention in one chapter. Plus, I can't see Marisol as the type to knock back a few after a hard day at work, so it'd be sort of wierd for him to chitchat about his favorite bar. 

So, new plan. Someplace further away, outside his precinct, but someplace he'd visit nonetheless. And one place came up: Inwood Hill Park. Admittedly, it's not very obscure, but I hadn't heard of it, so maybe Marisol wouldn't have either. 

Inwood Hill Park is a park in north Manhattan. It's 196 acres of mostly untouched nature - no development, not even planned growth. It's got a view of the Harlem River and a lot of wooded area. It seemed a good place for him to name-drop.

Of course, the problem is, would it be in character for Horatio to visit Inwood Hill on any sort of regular basis? I have him saying that he'd sometimes take the train up to Inwood Hill to go walking, which I can imagine him doing even if it was out of his way. I don't peg him as a hiker in particular, but I do think after all that time patrolling the streets, he'd like a breath of fresh air. After all, he certainly seems to enjoy his scenery (witness all that time he spends staring out windows), and he has had at least one scene where he's gratuitously roaming the beach when he had no need to (I can think of two examples in Season 1 alone). So I think he certainly would enjoy a bit of a stroll, even if he had to take a train ride to get it.

Does that seem reasonably in character, or should I scrounge up another lesser-known Manattan landmark?