Bila Anda pencinta tumbuh tumbuhan dan ingin merencanakan liburan, cobalah Anda datang mengunjungi Taman Buah Mekarsari. Tempat wisata yang terletak di Jalan Raya Cileungsi KM 03 ini adalah taman buah terbesar di Indonesia dan juga terdapat berbagai koleksi tumbuh-tumbuhan buah yang terdapat di seluruh dunia.
Tiket masuk Taman Buah Mekarsari ini sebesar Rp. 10.000 / orang dan tiket untuk mobil sebesar Rp. 5.000 dan sepeda motor sebesar Rp. 3.000. Jadi, dengan biaya yang tidak terlalu mahal, Anda dapat masuk ke taman buah seluas 265 hektar ini.
Anda juga dapat melihat lihat koleksi tumbuhan disini dengan menaiki kereta keliling dengan membeli tiket sebesar Rp. 10.000. Namun, Anda juga harus bersabar apabila terjadi antrian yang cukup panjang. Sewaktu dalam perjalanan untuk dapat melihat lihat koleksi koleksi tumbuhan, Anda tidak akan bertanya-tanya tentang keunggulan dari tumbuhan yang Anda lihat, karena ada keterangan dari pemandu wisata yang akan memberikan keterangan tentang keunikan buah dari tumbuhan tersebut.
Setelah Anda turun dari kereta keliling, Anda juga akan melihat kawasan outbound. Jadi, untuk Anda yang suka memacu adrenalin, kawasan ini patut Anda coba. Selain kawasan outbound ini, terdapat juga danau tempat Anda dan keluarga bisa menikmati berlayar dengan perahu dayung ataupun perahu boat. Bagi Anda yang ingin menikmati suasana dengan pasangan, Anda juga dapat menyewa perahu bebek. Sehingga suasana akan terasa romantis bukan?
Terdapat pula jembatan gantung yang terdapat di atas danau tersebut. Anda dan teman-teman Anda dapat berfoto diatas jembatan ini dengan latar belakang yang Anda jarang temui di Jakarta. Sewaktu tiba saat makan siang terdapat pula kedai kedai makanan yang dapat Anda pesan, sambil menikmati makanan di bawah pohon dengan alas tikar dan berlesehan.
Setalah Anda puas menikmati semua ini, Anda juga dapat menaiki kereta wisata lagi untuk kembali menuju tempat awal Anda menaiki kereta. Sebelum Anda pulang, Anda dapat membeli souvenir sebagai oleh oleh. Dan sebelum Anda meninggalkan taman buah yang dibangun atas prakarsa Alm. Ibu Tien Soeharto ini, sempatkan waktu sebentar untuk memasuki kawasan "Garden Paradiso". Tempat ini juga telah menjual koleksi bonsai dan dijual dengan harga yang terjangkau. Jadi, untuk Anda yang suka dengan tumbuhan, cobalah untuk menikmati liburan Anda dengan mengunjungi Taman Buah Mekarsari.
TEMPAT WISATA TAMAN BUAH MEKARSARI
Hockey is not exactly known as a city game, but played on roller skates, it once held sway as the sport of choice in many New York neighborhoods.
“City kids had no rinks, no ice, but they would do anything to play hockey,” said Edward Moffett, former director of the Long Island City Y.M.C.A. Roller Hockey League, in Queens, whose games were played in city playgrounds going back to the 1940s.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the league had more than 60 teams, he said. Players included the Mullen brothers of Hell’s Kitchen and Dan Dorion of Astoria, Queens, who would later play on ice for the National Hockey League.
One street legend from the heyday of New York roller hockey was Craig Allen, who lived in the Woodside Houses projects and became one of the city’s hardest hitters and top scorers.
“Craig was a warrior, one of the best roller hockey players in the city in the ’70s,” said Dave Garmendia, 60, a retired New York police officer who grew up playing with Mr. Allen. “His teammates loved him and his opponents feared him.”
Young Craig took up hockey on the streets of Queens in the 1960s, playing pickup games between sewer covers, wearing steel-wheeled skates clamped onto school shoes and using a roll of electrical tape as the puck.
His skill and ferocity drew attention, Mr. Garmendia said, but so did his skin color. He was black, in a sport made up almost entirely by white players.
“Roller hockey was a white kid’s game, plain and simple, but Craig broke the color barrier,” Mr. Garmendia said. “We used to say Craig did more for race relations than the N.A.A.C.P.”
Mr. Allen went on to coach and referee roller hockey in New York before moving several years ago to South Carolina. But he continued to organize an annual alumni game at Dutch Kills Playground in Long Island City, the same site that held the local championship games.
The reunion this year was on Saturday, but Mr. Allen never made it. On April 26, just before boarding the bus to New York, he died of an asthma attack at age 61.
Word of his death spread rapidly among hundreds of his old hockey colleagues who resolved to continue with the event, now renamed the Craig Allen Memorial Roller Hockey Reunion.
The turnout on Saturday was the largest ever, with players pulling on their old equipment, choosing sides and taking once again to the rink of cracked blacktop with faded lines and circles. They wore no helmets, although one player wore a fedora.
Another, Vinnie Juliano, 77, of Long Island City, wore his hearing aids, along with his 50-year-old taped-up quads, or four-wheeled skates with a leather boot. Many players here never converted to in-line skates, and neither did Mr. Allen, whose photograph appeared on a poster hanging behind the players’ bench.
“I’m seeing people walking by wondering why all these rusty, grizzly old guys are here playing hockey,” one player, Tommy Dominguez, said. “We’re here for Craig, and let me tell you, these old guys still play hard.”
Everyone seemed to have a Craig Allen story, from his earliest teams at Public School 151 to the Bryant Rangers, the Woodside Wings, the Woodside Blues and more.
Mr. Allen, who became a yellow-cab driver, was always recruiting new talent. He gained the nickname Cabby for his habit of stopping at playgrounds all over the city to scout players.
Teams were organized around neighborhoods and churches, and often sponsored by local bars. Mr. Allen, for one, played for bars, including Garry Owen’s and on the Fiddler’s Green Jokers team in Inwood, Manhattan.
Play was tough and fights were frequent.
“We were basically street gangs on skates,” said Steve Rogg, 56, a mail clerk who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and who on Saturday wore his Riedell Classic quads from 1972. “If another team caught up with you the night before a game, they tossed you a beating so you couldn’t play the next day.”
Mr. Garmendia said Mr. Allen’s skin color provoked many fights.
“When we’d go to some ignorant neighborhoods, a lot of players would use slurs,” Mr. Garmendia said, recalling a game in Ozone Park, Queens, where local fans parked motorcycles in a lineup next to the blacktop and taunted Mr. Allen. Mr. Garmendia said he checked a player into the motorcycles, “and the bikes went down like dominoes, which started a serious brawl.”
A group of fans at a game in Brooklyn once stuck a pole through the rink fence as Mr. Allen skated by and broke his jaw, Mr. Garmendia said, adding that carloads of reinforcements soon arrived to defend Mr. Allen.
And at another racially incited brawl, the police responded with six patrol cars and a helicopter.
Before play began on Saturday, the players gathered at center rink to honor Mr. Allen. Billy Barnwell, 59, of Woodside, recalled once how an all-white, all-star squad snubbed Mr. Allen by playing him third string. He scored seven goals in the first game and made first string immediately.
“He’d always hear racial stuff before the game, and I’d ask him, ‘How do you put up with that?’” Mr. Barnwell recalled. “Craig would say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and by the end of the game, he’d win guys over. They’d say, ‘This guy’s good.’”
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