The all-day tour New York, NY

New York, NY

Big day today – a nine hour tour around Manhattan. Thought we’d take tour early in the visit to get a taste of places to go back and visit in more detail. First stop – a church.. Saint Who Gives A Toss, I think it was. So … Next! Next was a quick stop at the Rockefeller Centre (sorry, Center) – with the price of New York real estate, owning two or three city blocks makes the mind boggle at just how much money is involved. Of course, the Rockefellers own stacks of apartments and other buildings around the place. Guess it’s nice work if you can get it 🙂 One positive note was that, apparently, no one is just handed a fat inheritance on a plate, you have to work for it just like all the Rockefellers before you.

Grand Central Station was up next – definitely spending more time there in a future visit. After all, we didn’t get close enough to the Apple Store there 🙂 Next up was one those real “I can’t believe I’m actually here” moments – the Empire State Building. One great thing about this tour was the way it was able to cut the queue and get us to the viewing area quickly. The building itself is pretty amazing, such an accomplishment for 1931. Note so classically beautiful on the outside as the Chrysler Building, but inside ere was plenty of Art Deco goodness to enjoy. Oh and apparently there’s a view. 🙂 Which is, of course, just amazing. And not near as cold or windy outside as I was expecting. Just the fact that “holy crap, here we are, standing on the real actual genuine Empire State Building” was amazing. That building that had in one way or another kind-of been a part of all our lives, we’ve all heard about it ever since ever, whether through TV, Movies, books, whatever… and here we were, snapping photos like the millions of tourists before us – but heck, these were our photos, our little reminder of this real ‘wow’ moment. Can you tell I enjoyed it just a bit?

Suitably wowed, it was time to move on. Chinatown, Little Italy, Nolita (North of Little Italy), and a stop for lunch at Chelsea Market. We need one of these in Sydney! Very cool, a little bit Newtown, a little bit Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, all positioned in an old Nabisco factory, its old brick walls and leftover fittings just dripping with post-industrial cool. Also nearby was The High Line – a leftover elevated freight rail line that has been converted into a public park, albeit a rather long and skinny one. Definitely worth a revisit to that, I think.

Driving alongside the Hudson, we get to Wall St… of which there is actually very little. Surprised at how small and relatively insignificant the street was, although as we all know, what goes on there is anything but insignificant. Ellis Island (home to the Statue of Liberty) is still closed to fix damage caused by hurricane Sandy last year, so they got us as close as they could, by taking us all over to Staten Island on the Staten Island ferry. I wasn’t having the best time at this point as I think lunch must have had something that didn’t quite agree with me. So I was more “righto, there’s the staue of liberty, er ok I’m going back to sit down and feel sorry for myself now.”

The last stop was the September 11 memorial site. Kinda relieved, if that’s the word, to see that was sombre, quiet, thoughtfully and respectfully designed. A fittingly peaceful monument to all the horribleness of the time. The tour ended where it began, back at Times Square, giving us plenty of food for thought on what to go and revisit for the subsequent days in New York. Dinner at the very retro Tick Tock Diner finished a surprisingly tiring day, considering how much time we spent just sitting in a bus. No dumb-tourist stories to report today, we must be getting used to the place! Rain is forecast for tomorrow so lets see how that goes… Might be a shopping/galleries/museums day. Probably without the galleries and museums though 🙂