Thursday 27th April
5 o'clock and my phone was going off to get us out of bed. In the end, I ended up snoozing it, as Charlotte's wasn't due to go off until half past. We pretty much got up and headed out, as our bags were packed the night before and we were ready to go. There was no free breakfast from the hostel, so we had no reason to hang around or ask for some early bagels, so we walked the 10 minutes to the nearby greyhound station. Unsurprisingly, the bus was really busy but we did manage to get our seats together, as usual. The journey was scheduled to take 2 hours but we weren't confident the New York traffic would hold up enough for that. We both slipped in and out sleep along the way but we both roused when the bus was starting and stopping as it approached Manhattan. It wasn't too bad in the end as, being in a bus, we could use a bus lane. This meant we skipped the backed up cars and rolled in to the bus station around 20 minutes late. From the bus station, it was easy to access the metro, where we hopped on a train that took us around 20 minutes to get to our hostel, which was in the borough of Queens, just across the Hudson River. It was still early, so we couldn't check in yet, so after a quick breakfast of toast we'd had left over, we decided to head straight out. I'll stress now, Charlotte and I have both been to New York before, on separate occasions, so we weren't really heading out to do anything in particular; we were just using it as a stop to break up journeys. We walked back to the metro and rode an E train all the way to its terminus at the World Trade Centre. We weren't after the memorial though and instead, we found Broadway and headed south until we found a statue of a charging bull, that Charlotte and I had both paid visits to on our precious trips. The bull is quite famous and renowned for being anatomically realistic, to put it politely. There were huge crowds around the bull, but we managed to squeeze our way in and get a quick photo. From the bull, we headed further south, until we couldn't go any further on Manhattan island. We ended up on the prom of battery park, where we could just about make out the Statue of Liberty through the smog/fog/low cloud. Again, we'd seen it before, so didn't feel paying for the boat trip was completely necessary. As we'd missed our morning coffee, we found a Starbucks, which isn't hard in New York and rested our legs before a big walk. We were walking from the tip of Manhattan island, all the way up to Central Park, just for the fun of it. That's about 5 miles, but after just a few blocks it had seemed like we'd covered double that because of how slow we had to walk stuck behind tourists fascinated by a yellow cab or locals staring at their mobile phones. After a while, we got sweaty and tired, so decided to take a break in a 7/11, where we purchased a microwaveable burrito (I know, terrible!), a banana and a drink. The energy boost helped and we made it across to 5th avenue and up to 48th street in pretty good time. 48th marks the vague area where Times Square is, so we spent some time browsing in some shops that specialised in sporting goods before coming away empty handed and then crossed over to Times Square for a brief look around. We'd been on the look for a pin badge the whole way up and had found them for $4.99. We took the risk to wait until Times Square, where we knew there would be plenty of shops but also thought it could be more expensive. It was a risk worth taking though, as we only had to shell out $1.99. We continued our whistle-stop stroll of Manhattan by continuing back up 5th avenue, past the plaza hotel which was featured heavily in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and onwards into Central Park. Somehow, we'd managed to be out for almost 7 hours and we were pretty tired from all the walking. We took a seat on a bench in the park and let the world go by whilst we regained some strength in our legs. We didn't fancy criss crossing the humongous park (been there, done that) so we hunted down the nearest metro station and headed home. Once back, we were famished so we dropped our things and headed straight down to the petit kitchen to cook up our dinner. We had a few veggies left over from other dinners so made use of them and also took great advantage of the free food shelf where we found 2 half bags of pasta, which we used for dinner and a full pack of spaghetti, which we nabbed and put in our bag for future reference. It made dinner incredibly cheap, which was good, considering how much we'd spent on metro fares across New York and Philly.
I'm afraid to say that's it for New York City. It was almost as whistle-stop as our stay in Shanghai was earlier in the trip, only in New York, we felt no pressure to not miss anything, which was nice. Fingers crossed the next few weeks are a bit more interesting though.
"I'm shipping up to..."
James and Charlotte
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