New York

Saturday 17 May 2008

After all the rain yesterday, today turned out to be bright and sunny – if not overly warm. But good enough for Jill and I to hop on one of the metro buses to take us ‘downtown’ to pick up the New York tourist bus that Jill had bought an “all loops/48 hour” tour ticket for the day before. The metro buses are pretty good insofar as they either lower the bus for a ramp extension, or have a hydraulic lift that just takes the chair up to the floor level of the bus. With the bus systems so busy, it’s a valiant effort on behalf of the driver to assist with this process – however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that people are all quite accommodating about waiting and squashing up to make room.

We thought we should start heading toward Staten Island Ferry. The tour bus took us close and we found our way into the Ferry Terminal only to wait with an already huge and growing crowd for around 30 mins. As it turned out, there was plenty of room for everyone as long as you didn‘t mind sitting inside rather than up the top and outside where all the action was taking place, such as when we passed the Statue of Liberty. One annoyance was the need for everyone to disembark on the other side before lining up all over again to catch the next one back!

We then picked up the ‘downtown tour’ bus to complete the circuit to Times Square, which both of us had now done twice. However, it was interesting to hear how different tour guides talked about different points of interest on the tour. Off again at Times Square to catch the ‘uptown tour’. We were beginning to think that we probably wouldn’t make the ‘night tour’. There’s really only so much bus touring you can take in a day. The ‘uptown tour’ took us right past our hotel up along the Hudson River area, into Harlem and Spanish Harlem, where we saw the ‘Cotton Club’ and ‘Apollo Theater’, before heading back down the length of 5th Avenue with all the museums and some pretty expensive real estate – home to some pretty rich people. Names were dropped but, not being much of a ‘groupie’, nothing much has stuck. Except for when we drove past John Lennon’s apartment around Central Park West – also the place where he was shot and killed. Apparently, Yoko Ono still lives there.

By the time we finally got off the bus, it was 6.00pm and I was just about catatonic. We still had to walk a couple of blocks to catch the metro bus back to the hotel, but I was really exhausted from doing practically nothing all day. Jill said she felt OK and was used to not moving a lot – which I suppose was my problem as I’m used to be more physically active and found it tiring just sitting around all day. I almost tipped Jill out of her chair on broken pavements and uneven ‘curb cuts’ a couple of times but I think she’s figuring out how to quickly rebalance now.

We decided to have dinner at a restaurant to cap of the day. Generally, we’ve been in the habit of picking up pre-prepared food from a supermarket and eating in Jill’s more spacious room. At least that way you can avoid paying all those pesky (and progressively expensive) tips. We had Italian, mainly because it was the first one we came to that looked half decent and I was too pooped to push Jill’s chair anymore. Mind you, you can get any kind of food you could think of in New York. Just a couple of doors down, there’s a restaurant promoting itself as “Chinese/Spanish”??? I don’t think so . . .

Only a couple more days to go in New York but I think I’m ready to move on when the time comes. Tomorrow Jill will visit a new horse exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History and Peggy Backman has offered to show me her favourite, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is also close to the Guggenheim. I think that should just about do it for the time being.