Our Travel Blog: 25th & 26th May

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