These days, JFK Airport's TSA line is so backed up it’s purportedly merged with the Cronut line in SoHo. Filling a tank with gas costs more than my monthly Con Edison bill. And vacations are great, but taking one currently means spending untold hours waiting in airports or paying an arm and a leg to drive anywhere outside the tristate area. You’re probably already paying an arm and a leg to live in New York City, so now seems like a great time to make the most of it and stay close to home. This great metropolis has plenty to offer, including a variety of often overlooked alternatives to the wider world’s offerings. Below is a small sampling of ways city slickers can keep it local while feeling global.

Instead of hiking Sequoia National Park, get lost in the Staten Island Greenbelt

Sure, the majestic beauty of the giant, ancient trees in California’s Kings Canyon is breathtaking, the rugged foothills and deep canyons of Sequoia National Park are awe inspiring, and the General Sherman Tree is literally the largest tree in the world, but you know what else is really big? The Staten Island Greenbelt.

Seriously! It’s 2,800 acres smack in the middle of everyone’s favorite borough, offering New Yorkers more than 35 miles of marked hiking trails and myriad environments – Mature forests! Wetlands! Meadow! Wildlife! – in which to walk out their pedestrian road rage. Also, there’s a vintage carousel of mythical beasts and traditional horses, and you can have a party there.

Abstain from Sin City and place your bets at Resorts World Casino

The house always wins, so why bother schlepping out to Las Vegas to lose all your money when you can just take the A train to the stop right before Howard Beach-JFK Airport – Aqueduct Racetrack – and play the slots at what is, for now, New York City’s only casino.

Sure, there are only electronic table games and you can’t smoke inside and it’s not open 24 hours but oh, the convenience! And if you’re insufficiently depressed or still have too much money to burn after you leave, the actual Aqueduct Racetrack is within walking distance. The inside kind of feels like if you could gamble in a DMV waiting room, and the outside has actual horse races (sometimes).

Missing Mykonos? Dine at Astoria Seafood

Sitting oceanside while enjoying the magnificent sunset and some saganaki from a white stucco restaurant in Greece does sound nice, but getting there will certainly require enduring at least some amount of turbulence, and the East River kind of looks like the Aegean Sea if you’re drunk enough. Astoria Seafood is a spirited slice of Greece plopped far from the Mediterranean, but just a short walk from the R train. Here you can order from a menu of reasonably priced authentic delights like spanakopita and souvlaki or choose your own seafood from metal bins, pay for it by the pound, and then wait for staff to cook it and serve it to you.

Don’t go on a multiday cruise – just motor around the harbor

Cruises are well-known for their potential to become expensive, floating petri dishes of sea sickness and disastrous mechanical issues. Medical care is limited, environmental impact is horrible, and you stand to be stranded overseas if you miss the boat. Who needs that? Get your sea legs here, at home, in New York Harbor.

Classic Harbor Line offers a variety of regular cruises that start at $52 and will let you drink in and on the high seas of Gotham, learn about architecture, wildlife, take in a sunset, listen to some light jazz, appreciate the skyline from a new angle, and be back on land in as little as an hour-and-a-half. No multiweek disease incubation, pirates or living in a tiny cabin even smaller than your apartment!

Blow off the Blue Lagoon and take a dip at Coney Island

Iceland’s natural bioluminescent miracle and health-assisting waters are cool and all, but have you ever swum with the cigarette butts while men hook dogfish shark off a nearby pier? The Blue Lagoon is a nice little layover jaunt of a natural miracle, but Coney Island is truly like no other place in the world in terms of overstimulating, impossibly diverse, unbelievably chaotic boardwalk antics, impromptu dance parties, funnel cakes, that candy apple store from “Anora” and, of course, excessive, nauseating, quantities of hot dog. Think Bjork can digest over 70 dogs in 10 minutes? No sir, that’s a New York thing.

We have Frank Lloyd Wrights at home

The late, great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed over 1,000 architectural works in his seven-decade career, and realized barely any of them in New York City. Meanwhile, Illinois — specifically Wright's longtime home of Oak Park — has the highest density of realized Wright works in the world.

But density shmensity; the Wrights we have in NYC are (arguably) all the more special for their rarity. We’ve got the UNESCO-designated Guggenheim Museum, which is pay-what-you-wish on Sundays and Tuesdays from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. On Staten Island, the Crimson Beech house, the only Wright-designed NYC residence, may be a private home but it’s one that’s conveniently located near two quality attractions – Historic Richmond Town and The Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art. We’ve also got the reassembled living room from Wright’s Francis Little House at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And lastly, if you want to ponder the erosion of city architectural quality, you might consider visiting the former location of Wright’s demolished Hoffman Auto Showroom at 430 Park Ave. in Manhattan, which is now an unremarkable glass office tower.

Pfft to the pyramids; okay to Kabab Cafe

The pyramids along the Nile are a feat of human engineering, a wonder of the world – but so is Chef Ali El Sayed's cooking. And banter. And general demeanor. I love this man. Do not go to Kabab Cafe if you’re on a tight schedule. Time ceases to exist within the bounds of this eclectically decorated, compact establishment. You’re on Ali’s schedule in here, and he cannot be rushed in preparing your mouthwatering meal. Last time I was there he cooked a bone marrow dish that I still dream about, and for dessert he gave me part of the chocolate bar he was eating.

Honestly, it’s almost a disservice to compare Kabab Cafe to anywhere else, because this is a distinctly unique, only in New York institution. Trying to find anything like this anywhere else is the real challenge.