New York New York and all it's cool-ness

Sooooooooooooooo......Martin felt like taking off to New York for a weekend, and who was I to stop him? On the 16th of February, that's exactly what we did. A seven hour flight on American Airlines (their snack packs were so incredibly fatty and bad for you it was quite funny), a tube ride, train ride and a short hop and a skip across the road found us in the Pennsylvannia Hotel. Whew. Funny story, on the train, we in our ignorance, tried to pass off a tube ticket for the train ticket. The lovely conducter told us to keep looking, wink wink. Very nice welcome into the Americas.

We had the ideal location really. Close to Times Square, and across the road from Madison Square Gardens. On arrival, we managed to wander to such places, and also got up the Empire State Building for dusk, almost. It was pretty stunning I have to say. The crowds were few, due to the worst snow storms in ten years passing through, and it being President Day weekend or something similar. So we were happy.
We caught a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Couldn't go right the way up, but had a look up her skirt anyway...(that's silly talk for 'saw how the inside is constructed'). Was pretty cool. The wind and rain came whilst we were there, and we sat in the docked ferry waiting to leave for about an hour. Too rough they said. Man, if they ever rode the Interislander they'd be embarrassed at their caution!


Statue of Liberty, the twin towers would be over Lucy's right shoulder.

Other attractions we took in included the usuals such as, Trump Towers, F.A.O Schwartz, and all of fifth avenue. No really. We went to Central Park for a few hours. That was lovely, then strolled back along Fifth avenue! Chrysler building, Ground Zero, Grand Central (margarita and free corn chips, so I could reminisce) and that's about it I think.

Highlights for me the star stalker: Coming across Kerri Russell filming for a movie in a park. Pregnant. We were able to watch the 'actions' and 'cuts' and stuff. Pretty exciting. (Kerri Russell played Felicity from drama of the same name).

On our last night there, we took in mass in the church across the road from our hotel. Amazing really, as you wouldn't really know it was there. We were expecting a makeshift kind of hall, but no, a full on church certainly existed. Following this, we strolled to Times Square, and feeling exhausted after all the walking, thought we'd sit down for dinner. Well, Saturday night in central New York? We were kidding ourselves. Queues for miles. So we headed back to the hotel, stopping at a Chinese buffet for cheap meal. Whilst dishing up our food, a lovely jubbly, big bouncy, disgusting brown rat scuttled across the floor. So that was the end of that. We couldn't get out fast enough! Ended up eating a bit posher at the Hotel restaurant. At least the chances of there being a rat in the room were lessened. We hoped. Hehe. Yuck.

Left New York the following Sunday, just in time for a bit of a snooze before work the next day.
A great trip, a bit chilly, but lots of fun. Would recommend the place for a stop over or longer!