New York - day one
Friday morning
On the Friday morning we were up early, it being the day we had planned to fly to New York. I had two motivations to visit New York, firstly; like many people it was something on my bucket list just because it is so famous and should be visited at least once. The second reason was that my maternal grandmother was born in New York and I wanted to visit the place where she was born. I do not know the exact address, but information that I do have tells me that she was born in Washington Square and she and her parents lived in Washington Place, an adjoining street.That morning, we had an hour’s drive to the airport, where TS (The Son) had arranged for a parking garage with a shuttle bus to take us to the airport. Once at Kansas City Airport, even though it is an internal flight, we had to go through all the anti terrorist security checks before we could get into the departures lounge. Interestingly enough, I found out on this trip that once over the age of 70, you do not need to take off your shoes, so still shod but beltless we went through the process of opening our bags and fighting the other passengers for an empty bin to hold the items to be inspected. Once repacked and able to wear a belt once more we went into the departures lounge and sat and waited for our flight.
Shortly after our tornado excitement, we saw that New York was also having weather alerts and high winds were expected with heavy rain, so we were fearing the worst. Not tornadoes, but just unpleasant weather. On the Friday morning, all these events had gone away and so we were hopeful that the weather would improve whilst we were there.
It is a two and a half hour flight from Kansas City airport to La Guardia airport, where we were heading and it passed reasonably easily, reading and playing games on the iPad, with occasional views of the ground between the clouds. When we had booked the flight, the five of us were split up into separate seats but just as we checked in with or boarding passes, there was a change and TBH was given the seat next to me. This was helpful, since we share stuff on flights. Someone must have realised that two people with the same last name were likely to be travelling together.
So we arrived in the Big Apple – just in time for the Friday afternoon rush hour.
TS used his Uber app to find a cab and one was less than a mile away, but the jam at the arrivals pick-up was solid and it took a long time for the cab to arrive and get close enough to load up. It took a similarly long time to inch out of the airport and onto the very crowded streets of Queens. Not only was it the Friday ‘let’s get outa here and go home’ rush, but there was a lot of construction going on where La Guardia is being ‘improved’. No doubt, it will be a big improvement in the long term, but causes a lot of problems for someone arriving during the improvements.
After a long long journey through the streets of New York, we finally arrived in the Garment District of Manhattan where our hotel was.
We were staying at the Fairview hotel in 36th street and were on the 23rd floor or, as one of the hotel notices said the 23th. Because the floor numbers miss out floor thirteen and Americans call the ground floor, the first floor, we were actually only twenty one floors up. This is still quite high and your ears pop as the elevator goes up and down, but it was not twenty three floors off the ground. Many people believe that the thirteenth floor is unlucky, so most hotels do not call the thirteenth floor thirteen, but go from twelve to fourteen. Why people are happy to be given a room on the thirteenth floor that is labelled fourteen I do not know. Maybe they can’t count. The view from our window was not inspiring, but we were in New York!
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| The View from our hotel window |
Saturday
Because we were not too far from Times Square, one of the first excursions we did the next day was to walk there and have a look at the sights. And I must say, there were some sights.You could if you wanted have your photo taken with various Marvel and other comic book characters and children were meeting Mickey Mouse and Sesame street characters, but for the older boys, there were two women with very little on in the way of clothing but with paint instead, who would let you have your picture taken in their arms for a small fee.
Times Square is not really a square, being more of a longish slightly more open area than the streets surrounding it, but all sorts of people gather there and all sorts of events take place there simply because it is Times Square.
Our first impressions of being on foot on the streets in Manhattan was noise, smells and crowds. A lot like London in the tourist areas, it was busy. Unlike London, you occasionally got a whiff of raw sewage as you walked along and the traffic was constantly hooting each other. There seemed to be a pattern to the hooting, some was impatient, ‘get out of my way’, but some short beeps said ‘OK buddy I am letting you through; go ahead.’
This rather poignant statute was not far from our hotel and we passed it regularly when we were going out. It was erected here on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 disaster.
In the USA you can usually turn right on a red light if the road is clear and there are no pedestrians still crossing. Lights give pedestrians right of way over turning traffic on a marked crossing, so people would stream across once the lights changed and then a queue of right turning traffic would wait creeping forwards slowly whilst the flood turned to a trickle and they could turn. If someone was a bit tardy, the cars would hoot them impatiently adding to the chorus of hooting. We fairly soon got the hang of the pedestrian lights and sometimes could see it was safe to start crossing before the pedestrian lights changed and so get ahead of the mob waiting to cross. You could spot the local New Yorkers, they were always well ahead of the mob just before the lights changed.
There are so many things to see in NY that we rather overdid it that first day, and the second day and… Well we walked a lot.
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| Times Square |
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| A model being photographed on top of an open top bus in Times Square |
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| More Times Square |
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| Some of the characters waiting to be photographed. A slightly paunchy Spider man and an unfit looking Captain America among them |
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| Times Square companions? They seemed to be doing good business. |
That day, after Times Square, we went to The Rockefeller Center, via a Barnes and Noble book store, for a browse and a coffee. There was a Lego store by the Rockefeller Center and so TS and TG wanted a look in there, so, we did a quick tour and then went on.
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| A greeter outside a toy store |
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| New York Police woman at the Rockefeller Center |
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| A statue on 5th Avenue with the Rockefeller Center building in the background |
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| Grand Central Station is certainly very grand |
We followed this with a visit to the Empire State Building.
By this time some of the party were too pooped to continue and so decided to wait inside the building whilst three of us we went up to the top.
We nearly overpaid and were only saved from getting ripped off by the tower ticketing system because their ticket machine did not work for us. The machine we encountered first was an express ticket vending machine that was supposed to get you to the head of the queue. Shocked at the outrageous price, we stopped and had a short discussion, whilst we allowed another family to use the machine, which gave then their expensive tickets. We then came to the decision, it was a once in a lifetime thing, so hang the cost and we tried to get our tickets, but the machine would not accept TS’s card. So after trying to get it to work for a couple more tries, we went further into the building and up a short flight of stars looking for another means of getting a ticket and found another machine which both took TS's card and cost about half the first machine's ticket price. These half price tickets made little or no difference to how rapidly you got to the top of the building.
You go up in two stages, the first stop is really just a long queue for the final staircase, but whilst waiting you pass by several windows and you are pretty high by that time. It was rather hazy on that day, so some of the more distant views were a bit dull looking,
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| Lower Manhattan |
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| Liberty Island through the haze |
From the top the views are spectacular and we could see almost all the most prominent landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and TS and I took endless photos.
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| New York has some weird looking buildings |
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| This one is known as the Flat Iron building because it is shaped like an old fashioned clothes iron |
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| I noticed that many of the most recent buildings are very narrow and tall. presumably in response to the cost of land in such a crowded city. |
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| Most of the buildings we saw under construction were very similar. |
Meanwhile, the other members of our family were not having such a good time. There were no chairs in the ground floor of the building and when totally exhausted with feet that are not often pain free from normal walking, TDIL and TG sat on the floor of the lobby. They were then told by an officious woman that sitting on the floor was not allowed and a slight issue occurred when TDIL indignantly pointed out that due to her arthritis, she needed to sit down and they had not provided any chairs and it was a bit heartless to expect tired aching people to remain standing whilst their family were visiting the tower (and incidentally contributing to paying this person’s wages) although that was not said out loud.
Meanwhile, once we had shuffled all the way around both upper floors that you are led to, we came back down and met up with TDIL and TG, who told us how they had been treated. After this we wended our way back to our hotel via a Starbucks for a loo and coffee break. That evening we ate in a nearby Italian restaurant and so that was day one.
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| This graffiti was inside the stairwell of the Empire State Building |
no more Snafu.?..
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