All I could hear was the gentle splash of paddles and oars dipping in and out of the water. The river itself was quiet, with only the occasional gurgle when it trickled over rocks or lapped at my kayak. Waterfowl glided near us, a water snake slithered by. Bald eagles — so many! — soared and swooped in the trees.

It was hard to believe this was the Delaware River, just a couple of hours from my home in Brooklyn.

Even though I live relatively close to it, I did not know much about the Delaware besides George Washington famously crossing it in 1776.

The annual weeklong paddling expedition covers about 80 miles of the river’s main stem, with a different section done each year. Participants can do as many days as they want (I did three, from the put-in at Lackawaxen, Pa., to Worthington State Forest, N.J.) The 2025 trip, which marks the event’s 30th anniversary, starts on June 14 at Balls Eddy, Pa., and ends in Phillipsburg, N.J. on the 20th. (Registration has opened.)

The Sojourn can swell to more than a hundred paddlers a day, from experienced kayakers to first timers. About 16 members of the National Canoe Safety Patrol (volunteers trained in first-aid and swift water rescue) make sure that everybody follows protocols and steer paddlers through the occasional Class I or II rapid.

Facing the Camping Challenge

I paddled alongside a young boy in a tandem kayak with his mother, and groups of rambunctious teenagers lobbing a foam football at each other. I chatted with Sojourn steering-committee member Lois Burmeister, 76, and her 12-year-old grandson, and with Ed McLaughlin, a gregarious 76-year-old retired school administrator, who became hooked on multiday trips after doing the Schuylkill River Sojourn.

“On the third day I thought I was going to die,” said Mr. McLaughlin, who got serious about kayaking in retirement. “But there’s something about being on the water and paddling, I just can’t explain it.”

The joy of being in the friendliest of armadas certainly was infectious. “A lot of people don’t have anybody to paddle with so this is an opportunity for them to do it — and to do it safely,” said Jacqui Wagner, who oversees safety on the water for the Sojourn. “And it’s a good place to learn.”

I had paddled before and was looking forward to traveling 10 to 13 miles a day on the Delaware. What freaked me out was the camping: While the Sojourn’s website lists accommodations within 30 minutes of the launches, the community formed by camping is a big part of the trip. And I had never done it.

So as not to embarrass myself on my first night, I practiced putting up my brand-new $60 Coleman tent in my small living room, then folding it back into its bag. When I got to the first site, on the grounds of the Zane Grey Museum in Lackawaxen, Penn., I was ready.

The Sojourn includes two to three meals a day, served cafeteria-style at communal tables. Perhaps because it is run by a nonprofit, the fee is a fairly affordable $100 a day, and includes your camping spot, transportation between the campsites and the launches, and boat rental along with paddle and personal flotation device.

“We could do this on our own,” said Victoria Hennessy, 59, a first-timer on the Sojourn. “But then we’d have to do all the food. Besides registration and gas, I haven’t spent one penny.”

To avoid packing and unpacking every night, participants stay a few days at each site — the 2025 edition will split its time between two Pennsylvania campgrounds, in Equinunk and Mount Bethel. The organization also has a longstanding relationship with Northeast Wilderness Experience, which handles the boat rental, while Sojourners are ferried to the river and back to camp in buses.

But in the end, it all revolves around the free-flowing Delaware, the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi, which runs through a corridor bordered by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. When we were not on it, we talked about it, with lunchtime and sometimes dinner talks linked to history of the river and its surrounding communities.

Joint efforts have helped clean up the Delaware over the decades. The dead fish I spotted floating belly up, for example, were actually a good sign: They were American shad, a species that travels from the ocean back to the river where they were born so they can spawn. For decades into the 20th century, the watershed by Philadelphia was so polluted that the fish could not make the journey upstream.

But thanks to state and federal efforts, the water quality has been greatly improved, to the benefit of all, including the shad. “If they are there, and even if you see them dead, that means they were able to come back, do their job, reproduce, and it’s part of the natural cycle,” said Kate Schmidt, a communications specialist for the Delaware River Basin Commission, which was created in 1961 to better coordinate planning, development and regulatory issues among the four states and the federal government.

A longtime supporter of the Sojourn, the D.R.B.C. is especially excited because the Delaware was voted Pennsylvania’s River of the Year for 2025 — with a festival to celebrate the award on June 18.

On Sojourn Time

I had plenty of time to relax and bask in the Delaware’s glory on my last day, when snafus delayed our morning departure by a couple of hours. Everybody patiently waited, chatting in the sun. When we finally started, headwinds had picked up, turning the expected easy 10-mile paddle to lunch into an unexpected workout. But we all got there and jumped on the waiting food, ravenous.

“There’s an expression we all use, ‘Sojourn time,’ to describe how we all just get into the groove and go with the flow, so to speak,” said Lorraine Martinez, 71, a steering-committee member who has been doing the trip for about two decades, though she now lives in Tennessee. “Nothing ever happens exactly on schedule — there are so many variables to contend with — so everyone just kicks back and lives in the moment.”

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about the latest court appearance by the music mogul Sean Combs, who is known as Puff Daddy and Diddy — and about conditions in the jail unit where he has lived for seven months. We’ll also get details on why a relatively small number of restaurants have applied for permits for outdoor dining structures under new city regulations.

On Monday, Sean Combs, the music mogul known as Puffy Daddy or Diddy, was in court — again.

He pleaded not guilty — again.

Then he was taken back to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he is Inmate 37452-054.

He has been a resident there despite his lawyers’ arguments that he should be free until his trial begins. Several hearings were devoted to arguments over whether he was too much of a threat to the community and too likely to orchestrate witness tampering to be released on bail. Three judges decided that he was, so Combs has remained at the long-troubled jail.

The hearing on Monday, in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, was the latest since his arrest on racketeering and sex trafficking charges last year. The government had filed a document called a superseding indictment, which added a second major sex-trafficking charge to the allegations.

Combs, wearing a tan prison shirt and slacks, walked into court smiling. His once-jet-black hair was whitish gray. So was his beard.

Judge Arun Subramanian asked if Combs had seen the latest version of the indictment and understood the charges. Combs said he had and, as before, pleaded not guilty. It was the same plea he had entered at his arraignment after the original indictment last year.

Combs’s lawyers and the prosecutors sparred over whether there were emails from a woman identified only as Victim 4 that should be turned over to the defense and whether additional time was needed to go through them. When Combs’s lawyers indicated that they might ask for a two-week adjournment, Subramanian gave them 48 hours to submit a request, saying, “We are a freight train moving towards trial.” Jury selection is scheduled to begin on April 28.

The government has described Combs in court papers as the boss of a violent criminal conspiracy that committed kidnapping, arson and drug crimes while enabling Combs’s sexual abuse of women.

Combs’s lawyers have countered that the charges actually center on consensual sex with long-term girlfriends. The defense has acknowledged that Combs has had “complicated relationships” with significant others, as well as with alcohol and drugs, but has argued that those troubles do not “make him a racketeer, or a sex trafficker.”

For Combs, jailhouse life is different from the enormous mansions with personal chefs that he once enjoyed. My colleague Julia Jacobs writes that he has been staying in an area of the jail known as 4 North, a fourth-floor dormitory-style unit where roughly 20 men are housed. It has often held high-profile inmates. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur who is appealing his fraud conviction, was a neighbor on 4 North until recently. Luigi Mangione, who shares a lawyer with Combs, is awaiting trial from the same jail, but is not being held in 4 North.

The conditions there are not as restrictive as in a separate unit where inmates typically spend 23 hours a day in their cells. Detainees on 4 North are generally free to move around the unit. It has televisions, a microwave and a room where inmates have in the past worked out on mats with exercise balls, said Gene Borrello, a former inmate who said he was placed on 4 North because he had helped the government convict members of the Mafia.

Detainees in 4 North do not have access to the internet, but they could watch movies and listen to music on tablets purchased in the commissary, he said.

Combs meets with members of his legal team frequently, sometimes in a conference room off the common area of 4 North. He was provided a laptop without Wi-Fi — at his lawyers’ urging — to work through the mountain of evidence that prosecutors have turned over before trial. He can use the laptop between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. each day in the unit’s visiting room or in a room reserved for inmates to take video calls.

Telephone calls are limited to 15 minutes each. But prosecutors have said that Combs bought the use of other inmates’ phone privileges. On some of those calls, the government said, Combs strategized about using public statements to affect the potential jury pool’s perception of him. They also said he had tried to contact potential witnesses through three-way calling, which allows him to reach people outside his approved contact list. The defense says Combs’s communications have not been illicit.

Prosecutors have also said that Combs orchestrated a video, later posted to his Instagram account, that showed his seven children wishing him a happy birthday, with Combs on speakerphone. After it was posted, prosecutors said, Combs — long known for his attention to marketing — monitored the analytics from jail.

Weather

Expect a mostly cloudy morning with a chance of rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon and eventually some sun. The temperature will reach into the mid-60s. In the evening, there will be a chance of rain or a thunderstorm and a dip into temperature to around 43.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Thursday (Holy Thursday).

The latest Metro news

Whatever happened to outdoor dining? Only a small portion of the city’s restaurants have applied for permits for dining structures under new regulations.

Restaurant owners say the process is complicated and expensive.

“It was kind of presented as a lifeline, and then you get into it and you’re like, ‘Wow, I think I’ve been duped,’” said Megan Rickerson, the owner of the Someday Bar in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. “If you had known upfront what it would entail, would you have done it? Because I can tell you my answer would’ve been no.”

The city told restaurateurs who wanted to replace ad hoc dining setups with modular structures to reapply for permits by August last year.

But only about 3,400 have done so, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. By April 8, only 32 had received full approval for a roadway structure. The department has granted conditional approval for 623 roadway structures and about 1,850 sidewalk cafes, allowing businesses to construct their setups while their applications are processed.

My colleague Olivia Bensimon writes that most of the establishments with roadway permits are concentrated in wealthier areas. At the height of the pandemic-era outdoor dining program, authorized on an emergency basis to keep restaurants afloat, there were at least 12,500 “streeteries,” and they were equitably distributed citywide, according to data from the comptroller’s office.

METROPOLITAN diary

Summer clearance

Dear Diary:

This occurred years ago, when I was a newly married New York City public-school teacher furnishing the new apartment my husband and I had moved into.

One late-August afternoon, I met two friends for lunch at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Afterward, I walked to Bloomingdale’s to see if they had any items I could use in the apartment.

As I entered the store, I saw a sign hanging above the lower level: “Big Summer Clearance Sale.”

I went downstairs. To my amazement and delight, I saw tables overflowing with kitchen items like dishes and small electrical appliances; bathroom towels; and blankets, comforters, sheets and pillows for the bedroom. Everything I needed.

A young saleswoman offered to help me. I soon realized that I could not carry all of my purchases home on the subway.

The saleswoman said that Bloomingdale’s would deliver everything to my home at no charge and within a week.

I gave her my address: 495 East 55th Street.

She looked overjoyed.

“Sutton Place?” she asked.

I smiled.

“No,” I said. “Brooklyn.”

Her smile vanished. But my purchases were delivered within a week, as promised.

— Evelyn Oberstein

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Two influential New York City labor unions that backed Mayor Eric Adams in 2021 switched their support on Monday to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, reflecting his growing dominance as the race for mayor accelerates.

The coveted endorsements came from the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which represents building workers. Together, the unions have more than 125,000 members, and they typically spend millions of dollars supporting their chosen candidates.

Both unions have a contentious history with Mr. Cuomo. They worked with him to pass a statewide increase to the minimum wage and other policies as governor, but later called for his resignation in 2021 amid mounting sexual harassment accusations. (Mr. Cuomo, who resigned, denies any wrongdoing.)

Now, they have concluded that Mr. Adams is fading politically and Mr. Cuomo is on an increasingly direct path to City Hall. And like much of the city’s Democratic establishment, the unions appear more interested in making amends than antagonizing a famously sharp-elbowed leader who could soon have influence over city contracts and other union priorities.

In a joint endorsement on Monday, the union leaders praised Mr. Cuomo as a steady supporter of working New Yorkers and the kind of leader who could stand up to President Trump as he threatens to withhold federal funding from cities like New York and undermine labor rights.

“As Andrew Cuomo said when he recently addressed our members, when we need him in a fight, he will be in the foxhole with us until the end,” said Rich Maroko, the head of the hotel and casino union.

Mr. Maroko did not address his change of heart since four years ago, when he said that Mr. Cuomo was not fit to be governor. He did, however, acknowledge that Mr. Cuomo could be an important ally as the union negotiates a new citywide hotel contract.

The endorsement was as much a boon to Mr. Cuomo, 67, as it was a blow to his rivals. With just over two months to the primary, they urgently need fresh momentum to chip away at his steady lead in public opinion polling and had hoped the unions might help.

As Mr. Cuomo rolled out his newest supporters, his rivals were lampooning a rare blunder by his campaign, which posted a housing plan that included garbled passages and appeared to draw, at least in part, on material collected by ChatGPT, news that was first reported by Hell Gate, a local news site.

“I did the hard work to pass city laws that will create 120,000 new housing units,” Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker and another candidate in the Democratic primary for mayor, wrote on X. “Andrew Cuomo asked ChatGPT what his housing policy should be. Guess someone does need on-the-job training.”

The campaign made more sloppy mistakes on Monday when it announced the union endorsements. Its news release misspelled the names of Mr. Maroko and Manny Pastreich, the president of 32BJ, in bold-faced type summarizing the news.

Still, it was hard for other candidates to entirely sidestep the sting of losing out on the support of two unions known in New York City for their political influence.

In 2021, the hotel and building workers’ unions were at the heart of a working-class coalition that helped propel Mr. Adams to victory, and they have worked closely with his administration.

This time, though, both unions concluded that Mr. Adams had no path to re-election. After courting Mr. Trump’s help to shake federal corruption charges, Mr. Adams decided to skip the Democratic primary and run as a political independent this fall.

The unions considered other Democrats, including Ms. Adams and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist running a distant second behind Mr. Cuomo. But the candidates evidently failed to convince the labor leaders they could win.

Other unions have reached different decisions. The union representing public defenders, museum staff members and academics endorsed Mr. Mamdani, State Senator Jessica Ramos and Brad Lander, the city comptroller, in a joint endorsement. Ms. Ramos, the chairwoman of the State Senate’s Labor Committee, also has the support of some teamster groups.

Other large unions remain undecided and could still shake up the race, including District Council 37, the city’s largest public employees union, and Local 1199 of the S.E.I.U, which represents health care workers. The longtime leader of the latter group, George Gresham, is said to personally support endorsing Mr. Cuomo but is facing a broader revolt within his union.

So far, Mr. Cuomo has consolidated the largest bloc of union support. He won earlier endorsements from unions representing New York City’s carpenters, electrical workers, painters and operating engineers.

The groups typically point to Mr. Cuomo’s long track record and moderate, pro-labor and pro-immigrant stances as governor to explain their support.

Mr. Cuomo thanked the unions that backed him on Monday, saying they had been “failed by their government for too long.”

“Without a strong middle and working class, no city can survive — let alone thrive — and right now, we are dangerously close to losing them,” he said.