Picking up from where I left off, our next big adventure was our trip to New York. A fleeting 24 hour trip, but an exciting one nonetheless. We caught the bus on the Tuesday evening and at 9pm we saw the flashing lights ahead and before we knew it we were at Penn Station, New York City. Our first holiday together... if you can call it that! We'd arrived so late that after having some food we slowly wound our way up Amsterdam Avenue (via Times Square) to our hostel where we crashed early for the night in preparation for the next day's super-sight-seeing-tourist-extravaganza.
So we rose up the next morning to the sound of sirens whizzing past and people screaming up and down the streets and, having spent less than 10 hours in our hostel, we checked out. We mastered the subway - which makes London tubes look like a haven in comparison - and made our way down to the site of the World Trade Centre, via a Dunkin Donuts for breakfast of course - might as well make the most of being in America! The Ground Zero area is still very much a building site which we noticed as soon as we came within a few blocks of it because the area is thick with dust, and sadly you can't really see the memorial garden from the outside which is a shame. You have to book in advance in order to go in which we didn't to because apparently it's booked up for the next year or so, so maybe next time!
Sadly the previous glorious weather we had enjoyed, no longer decided to grace us and so we wandered around a grey, drizzly New York with hoods up and umbrellas seeing some of the not quite so touristy sites. We'd both done New York before and seen the Statue of Liberty etc and so where did we go instead... why 66 Perry Street of course...
Our next less-touristy stop was a place called The Highline which I'd happen to have come across only a few days before through the BBC news homepage. It is basically a brand new public park in the centre of Manhattan but one which is above the roads and in the air. It's amazing, and somewhere I really recommend going to if you happen to be in New York. The history behind the structure is that it once housed the railway lines which transported goods into the city, in particular into the meatpacking district, and was for a long time known as 'the lifeline of New York'. Train's stopped running in the 80s and until the 90s it stood there gradually becoming overtaken by nature until the city proposed to knock it down. Of course there was outrage and petitioning and eventually this; a park in the sky and it is fabulous!
With viewing spots to just sit and watch the traffic go by and then more landscaped areas where the original train lines have been incorporated into the foliage it really is an amazing place to visit and was definitely one of the highlights of the day!
That is of course because we had yet to visit the main attraction of the day, around which we had planned all of our sight seeing... the Rockefeller Centre! WAY cooler than going up the Empire State building I reallllyyy recommend spending $23 to see the amazing views and read about the fascinating history of the building - built during the Great Depression to provide jobs is the simple version! I loved it, probably because I completely took the whole being a tourist and taking hundreds of cheesy photos in my stride, but also because there is definitely no better way to truly capture and see the city - well, not one that I've experienced!
The rest of the afternoon was spent wondering around seeing central park and looking for some food before our long bus journey home. We also managed to fit some shopping in, of course, and I managed to get some new snow boots in preparation for the coming winter. I'm actually so excited by my new purchase that I'm sort of looking forward to the snow just so that I have an excuse to wear them... but I'm pretty sure the novelty will wear off pretty fast!
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