27th May - New York

We had a bit of a sleep in this morning and didn't hit the streets until about 10.45am!  Today we stuck to midtown and did a bit of shopping on and around 5th Avenue.  On our way to a few shops on Madison Ave, we came across a movie being filmed (a scene with a car upside down caught on fire with a crowd cheering around it - still trying to work out what it could be)!!  

The weather was much better today, the sun was out and there was no wind, so our next stop was Central Park.  I don't think I've ever seen that many people in Central Park before in all my visits here.  It was Memorial Day today, and all of New York had come out to sunbake and hang out in the park.  We walked for miles, until our feet were so sore we couldn't walk anymore - by this stage it was 3pm!  We ended up back at FAO Schwarz on 5th Avenue, where we made our own Muppet!! After we had chosen all his parts, we then had to wait around for an hour for him to be made up. We were too tired to really walk any further, so we stuck in the general vicinity of the toy store.  After we picked him up, we headed back to the hotel for a bit of a rest before dinner.

Wade and I are big fan's of the TV show, How I Met Your Mother - so tonight we went for dinner at McGees.  This is the Irish Pub that McLarens from the show is modeled off.  Dinner was pretty good, and the pub had a nice atmosphere.  After dinner we wandered back down to Times Square to look through the shops for the last time.  It was much less busy tonight that it has been over the last few days which was nice.

Tomorrow we are off to Vegas!

Here are some photos from today.

Radio City & Rockefeller Centre

Lucky we've seen the Plaza Hotel before because it was covered in scaffolding!!

Central Park

Today's Ducks!

Enormous Snickers bar at FAO Schwarz

Muppet Making at FAO Schwarz

Our Muppet

25th & 26th May - New York

We decided to take up the Express Departure option on the last day of the cruise which meant we were in the first group that got off the boat and carried our own bags off.  We heard it can get pretty chaotic and slow going through customs if you try to get off later with the bulk of the passengers.  This meant we had to get up at 6am (which hurt a bit), but we were off the ship and on our way to the airport by 7.30am!!  We were hoping we might be able to get on an earlier flight to New York but no such luck.  Unfortunately this meant we had to sit in Fort Lauderdale airport for nearly 4 hours (which was like torture).  They had the A/C cranking and it was absolutely freezing in the airport, we tried about 5 different seats trying to find a warm one, but they were all the same!  As a positive, they had wifi, so we were able to catch up on what had been happening in the world while we had been on the cruise.

Those of you who came on our last trip, will remember how fun our arrival into JFK was.  In true form, it did not disappoint again.  Things were actually looking good, and we were going to be early getting in, until they put us in a holding pattern and made us circle for half an hour, then the kid in the row in front of threw up on the descent, then when we finally got to the gate, it took them 40 minutes to be able to get the jet way hooked up to the plane so we could get off.  Apparently it was a new terminal and it took about four different people before they found someone who actually knew how to operate the equipment properly!!  It was then almost a 2km walk to baggage claim (that is no joke - we must have been at the gate at the opposite end of the terminal) and then we walked outside and WOW - it was freezing!!!!  It was about 12 degrees, windy and rainy (not the 30 degrees we had been used to over the last couple of weeks)!!  After a hairy ride into the city, we finally made it to our hotel which is right on Times Square around 5.30pm.  Our room is on the 41st floor and has a partial view of Times Square which is pretty cool.  We rugged up a bit more and hit the streets.  It was Saturday night and it was actually pretty crazy out there (not as bad as when we were here at New Years but still pretty busy).  We wandered around for a while, checking out the shops and trying to find somewhere to eat.  After finally finding somewhere, Wade realised he was getting a migraine, so we had to come back to the hotel room so he could sleep it off!  My night consisted of playing on the laptop and eating my McDonalds dinner in the dark!!!

We woke up on Sunday ready to hit the streets and boy did we do some walking.  It was a bit less windy this morning, but still cold, so we decided to walk from our hotel on Broadway/46th St to the start of the High Line which was around 10th Ave/30th St, to warm up a bit.  The High Line is a public park/walkway that has been built on the old elevated freight rail line.  It runs for about a mile/1.6km and along the way there are gardens, places to sit, art work, and vendors selling different things.  It was a really cool way to see a part of the city that we hadn't been to before (thanks to Lizzy's friend Sarah for telling us about this)!!  After this we just started walking to see where it would take us.  We walked through the West Village, into parts of Chinatown, around the City Hall/Supreme Court area, through Wall St, down to Battery Park, past the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and along the East River bikeway past the piers and to the Brooklyn Bridge.  There was an insane amount of people walking along the bridge, so we didn't get very far across it before turning around, as it was time to go and see the 9/11 memorial.  Before we had left home we had gotten passes to visit the 9/11 memorial as we had read that you needed to do this to be able to visit.  We made our donation and picked our time (4pm).  When we got to the site it was chaos.  There was a line that wove through the holding area, around a corner and up a street and through security just to get in.  So much for having passes too, there were just as many people without them that had shown up as well and there was no organisation at all.  I heard someone say it would take about an hour to even get into the memorial area from where we were lined up.  After all the walking we had done today, we decided to pull out at this point.  In a way, it was pretty sad to see the site had become such a massive tourist attraction (even though we were kind of there to do the same thing, we didn't expect it to be the way it was).  I think our feet were about to give up at this point, so after navigating the maze that is the World Trade Centre construction site, we finally found a subway station and made our way back to the hotel for a rest (via Walgreens to pick up some drinks, Pringles and chocolates)!!

After a much needed rest, we headed back out onto Times Square and did some shopping,  We had decided to have dinner at Bubba Gump (as we hadn't ever eaten here on all our other trips).  By the time we got there though, it was an hour wait and our seating time was 9.45pm!  We went back out into Times Square and did a bit more shopping, before heading back to Bubba Gump for our dinner.  By this stage we were starving, and of course ordered too much food and completely stuffed ourselves.  Once we could move again, we headed back to the hotel for the night.

Here are some photos from our first two days in New York:

Times Square

Right near where we saw the ball drop when we were here for New Year's 

Cool buildings on the way to the High Line

Along the High Line

Lower Manhattan

New World Trade Centre building

Today's stand in duck!!

Times Square at night

17th May to 24th May - Fort Lauderdale & Cruise

Today we checked out of Disney and headed for our drive to Fort Lauderdale.  Wade tells me it was a horrible drive - with lots of traffic.  I wouldn't know - I was still pretty sick so I basically slept most of the trip.  We didn't arrive until later in the afternoon and checked straight into our hotel, which was right along the beach.  Lucky we got to drive along here, because that was literally all I saw of Fort Lauderdale (the rest I spent in bed)!!  Wade got out and explored a bit more, went for a walk along the beach and also found a mall!

We checked out of our hotel at lunchtime, and returned our hire car, before heading over to the cruise ship terminal to board our ship.  It was such a smooth process getting on the ship - I would say it took less than 10 minutes to drop our bags off, go through security, check in and get on the ship.  Our ship was the Royal Caribbean - Oasis of the Seas, which is the largest cruise ship in the world and it was amazing. We had an internal room, which felt a little bit like a cave at times but because we couldn't see the outside world, it was a great help in getting me to sleep in (there were multiple mornings that we slept until 10am)! Our cabin attendant was amazing and new us well by the time we left the ship.  The dining staff were also amazing, and made every meal a personal experience.  The food was good, but having a 3 course meal every night nearly killed us!!  We also got really lucky with the weather.  Between Nassau and St Thomas it was a bit windy on board, and it rained a little bit on the last day, but otherwise it was pretty much 30 degrees most of the time!

Had I not been sick for most of it I think I would have been able to enjoy alot more of the nightlife, but we still had fun and did alot both on board the ship and in port.  On board, Wade participated in basketball, volleyball, soccer and rock climbing competitions, and ended up with a Gold, Silver and Bronze medal from these!!! I also did the on board zip line and played some basketball and did some rock climbing and we both played putt putt and ice skated.  Not to mention the swimming and lazing around (I managed to finish 3 books while we were on there).  Wade also took full advantage of the fact that it was a cash less system on board, racking up both his and my share of alcohol consumption - it seems like it's free when you don't have to fork out any cash (until you get the bill at the end)!!! :-)  We also made friends with the bar staff at the Rising Tide bar (this bar was really cool and went up and down between 3 levels of the ship while you drank)!  We saw a few shows on board including and ice skating show, a diving show, a comedy show and a singing/dancing show.

Our first port stop was in Nassau, Bahamas and it was the morning after we boarded the ship.  It wasn't at all what we expected, parts of it felt a bit dodgy and you were harassed a fair bit by the locals trying to sell you anything and everything.  Because I wasn't well, we didn't venture too far, but maybe if we had gone to Atlantis it might have been a bit better.

Our second port stop was St Thomas. We caught a "communal taxi" into town in the morning (I feared for my life a few times, as there were no doors on this and I was on the outside edge, plus the floor was rusting out so if you pressed down on it too hard it moved!!).  We wandered around town for a bit, but there wasn't much there, unless you wanted diamonds (apparently I have all that I need)!!  Literally every second shop was a diamond shop, I'm not sure what could possibly be different between each shop either.  We found some markets and walked around these for a while, before heading back to the ship for some lunch.  After lunch we had booked an excursion which took us on the Sea Blaster boat to do some snorkeling with the sea turtles.  On the way out to Turtle Cove they make the boat go really fast and as you go over the waves the water comes in and you get completely saturated.  We got to see lots of sea turtles while snorkeling and there was also a reef in the area, so we also saw quite a few fish, sea urchins and one sting ray.  On the way back to the cruise ship, they provided us with a really nice rum punch as well!!

Our final port stop was St Maarten.  This was by far our favourite port and was a place we could actually go back and visit.  St Maarten is basically split in two with one half Dutch and the other half French.  We took an excursion which took us across to the French side, where we also got to go on a glass bottom boat trip and see divers feeding the reef fish.  We got dropped back on the Dutch side (which was where our cruise ship was), and we wandered through the shops and markets here, before having lunch at Hard Rock Cafe while checking out the beach.  We didn't go swimming here but we did walk along the beach and at least put our feet in the water!!

The last two days of the cruise were spent at sea, so we got to explore the ship during this time.  These were the only two days that we really noticed how many people were on board (mainly because we struggled to find a deck chair around the pool on one of the days because we got up too late)!!


Here are a whole heap of photos from the cruise:

Fort Lauderdale

Leaving Fort Lauderdale

Our Enormous Cruise Ship!

Our Hallway and Stateroom

Boardwalk area

Promenade Area

Adult's Only Solarium area

Activities around the ship!!

Ship at night

Nassau, Bahamas

St Thomas

There were no ducks on our cruise trip so this Iguana is a stand in!!

St Maarten