New York, New York

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Tue 4 Sep 2012 19:58

Fri, Sat, Sun & Mon – 31st Aug, 1st, 2nd & 3rd Sept

 

We all set off early at 0700 hours to go ashore and catch the train, with a small detour to collect the compulsory coffee ‘to go’ plus bagels.   Luckily the US Tennis Open is on at Flushing Meadows which is on our route, so extra trains are running, as well as the fact that Monday is Labour Day and this is the last week of the school holidays, so the trains and New York will not be heaving with humanity.

 

Craig suggested that we take the Circle Line boat trip around Manhattan to familiarise ourselves with the basics.   This we did with the purchase of NY City Pass which gives you 46% discounts to various attractions.   We also arrived with about an hour (they suggest 1.5 hours) to go before departure which was sensible as it gave us more of a choice of seats (port side in the shade, top deck - we aren't sailors for nothing you know!).

 

The trip was 3 hours and very informative, and 3 hours was just about all one could stand of the failed middle-aged actor (with "rug") giving his show.....   And it is a brilliant way to understand the layout of all the various areas;  I had never understood that Manhattan, where all the commercial activity, attractions and museums we think of as New York are based, is actually an island separated at the north by a canal from the mainland;  The Bronx on the other hand is on the east coast, with Yonkers to the north and New Jersey on the west side (sorry to all those intelligent people who already comprehend all this) - and that everything has to get on to the island by truck via only 16 bridges nowadays, as practically all the ship piers are no longer used and are getting reclaimed for real estate.   The boat also detoured south to go past Ellis Island and Lady Liberty herself, who was surrounded by dozens of other boats doing exactly the same thing.

 

After that Craig, our official tour guide, took us for a walk to immerse us in the atmosphere, empty though it is to him - having already given us (well Rob mainly) lots of coaching in the ridiculous NY accent and emphasis in speech.

 

And this has been the usual course of the last 3 days:  Go in by train, getting progressively later in the day each day as pavements take their toll on our poor old feet!  We have visited all those destinations that say NY to us:  Times Square (feels like Piccadilly), Wall Street (surprisingly less grand than I expected) and the Charging Bull sculpture installed by the artist, Di Modica and a few helpers illegally in 5 minutes flat,  in between police patrols, but today this was unfortunately draped in the inevitable tourists which Craig managed to chase off for the split second it took for me to get a photo!   A free few hours in MOMA on Friday evening,  American Museum of Natural History (dinosaurs & ocean hall), Central Park, Macy's and Sak's, Rockefeller Center (where Craig used to work), Grand Central Station, St Patrick's Cathedral, Trinity Church (both swathed in scaffolding, as was the Waldolf Astoria - in fact we have picked quite an R&R time to visit it appears!), South Street Seaport and the Bodies Exhibition (similar to Body Works in the UK with the plastination of real bodies.  This one is slanted towards education and healthy lifestyle, fairly vital in the US you might think!), Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Bridge across to Long Island.   And we still have lists of things we would like to visit....

 

Added to this is the gastronomic angle of each day:  most days start with Craig working out which wonderful eatery we can aim the day at and he has been most ticked off that some of his favourite haunts have been 'discovered' and therefore have enormous queues outside which our feet have not felt it was necessary to stand in.

 

The only difficult thing we have encountered is NY's subway system which is impossible to understand, not helped by holiday running timetables.   There is no easy diagrammatic layout as in London; different trains run express (ie missing out the station you expected to alight at) or local services; the intersections seem to be few and far between but you can get an unlimited Metro Card for 7 days, which allows you to take "14-20" rides - not quite what I understand as ‘unlimited’, nor does it tell you how it differentiates between these rides - but I am sure all will become clear at the most inconvenient time!   And the platforms are a bit creepy - far too many places for a baddie to hide it appears to me with several platforms all backing on to each other; they usually aren't the contained tiled concourses we are used to in London.   We have taken a couple of yellow cabs - one Craig had to direct (no ‘Knowledge’ here) and one driven by an Egyptian who did at least know where the Empire State Building was. You rarely find an American driver nowadays apparently.

 

And we are mastering the street layouts and how to find an address:  the key is a complicated formula of dropping the last digit of the avenue (north to south direction) address, divide by 2, then add a magic number applicable to your avenue and it gives you the cross street (east to west direction) number and you can then pinpoint it on a map of the city.   Now just as long as we don't lose the precious guide book its easy.

 

Finally, on Labour Day (Monday), we took a ‘boat day’ to catch up with jobs, water up and pump out Serafina’s toilets at the free Town Dock.  Karene and I were going to do large washes at the Laundromat but after trolleying our loads up there, discovered it was shut which was very annoying, so this has slipped to Tuesday.   And after all this, Craig and Karene very kindly, as ever, fed us and Steve (wife, Carol on a mercy mission to the UK) from Innamorata with succulent ribs and corn.

 

Only slight cloud on the horizon is the Tropical Storm ‘Leslie’ which is building in the Atlantic and might very well choose to come our way either as a Tropical Storm or more worryingly, as a full blown Hurricane. So we are all currently making plans for where to hide our boats (and ourselves) if this goes pear shaped.