It was an early morning start out of Toronto this smorning with a 3am wake-up call! A 30 min traffic free run to the airport had us arrive along with many others arrive about an hour before the immigration gates opened for entry into the US. Roll on 4.30am and the quese were building. Made our turn up to the automated passport booth only to find we had been directed into the wrong queue – we were in the US and Canadian queue for automated passport control – wrong! Over to the other queue please ….. ho hum, anyway made it down to the gate no problems and all aboard for the quick 1 1/2 hour flight to New York.The reasons we did all the immigration checks in Toronto were obvious – into the US there was nothing! We were in!
The next part of the journey was a 15 minutes wait for our shuttle service then a 2 1/2 hour SIT in the bus until we finally made it to the hotel in the middle of Upper Manhattan. 2 1/2 hours!!!!
Check in not yet available as no room available so we stowed our bags and headed off to the Circle Line boat ride around Manhattan Island. A lovely day out on the water and a great cruise – 2 1/2 hours and providing a great perspective on the layout of Manhattan. There are 2 main areas – Upper and Lower Manhattan, we’re staying in Upper Manhattan where Times Square is, although a good half hours walk away.
Lower Manhattan is almost another whole city area on it’s own and is where the World Trade Centre was destroyed in 2001 so we’re miles away (literally!) from there.
After our cruise, we headed back to the hotel for a ‘compulsory lie-down’! A 3am start was beginning to wear thin and both of us were finding it hard to stay awake! Once we’d had a good rest, we headed out again and walked a few blocks up to Times Square. Times Square and the surrounding area is just ALIVE at night. There are masses of people of all persuasions and races and weird concotions of them as well! Homeless, drunks, show-ponies!, beggars, businessmen, you name it! Times Square merges into Broadway and heaps of shows in the vicinity. The electronic billboards are huge! I always thought Hong Kong billboards were amazing but those around Times Square are even more so. All eye boggling! One fun feature was a mass of people with a huge billboard acting as the camera and movinf through the crows to focus randomly on anyone in the crowd. Lots of fun when those who were focussed on, found themselves to be part of a huge Times Square billboard!
Enough of that and we wandered back to the hotel with another day done!
