New York, New York day 2

OMG where do I begin. We walked and toured and walked and toured! Stephanie has a pedometer on her phone, so we set off with it going and we broke her record! A total of 28,790 steps. And 23.5 km. No wonder our feet hurt! Not to mention the 10km bike ride around Central park and the ride from Statue of Liberty docks to 911 Memorial site. So where did all these steps take us you ask?

Well we started at the Statue of Liberty of course. 

From there we made our way to the 911 memorial sight. I just cannot be in that place and not have tears come to my eyes. So many lives lost, so much devastation, it is just a really moving sight. 

We also got to see the survival tree. This is a tree that survived all this devastation around the twin towers. The tree was uprooted while they worked on rebuilding all this area. They moved it as far North as they could while still leaving it in New York.  It was nursed back to health in a rescue Nursery and then transplanted back in the memorial sight. It's root system is still a little week, so they have these cables holding it all in place. The tour guide explained that the root system will likely have sufficient width by next year for them to be able to remove all these cables.

From the Memorial, we made our way to Madam Tussaud's wax museum, where we got to play paparazzi and get our picture taken with all sorts of fake celebrities. We did stop along the way to grab some lunch at a street vendor. 

We left Madam Tussaud's and made our way to Central park where we rented some bikes and took a 2 hr guided tour of the park.

It really is quite a sight to see, a marvel of design really. You can have a busy city street, a few hundred yards away and not even realize it. 

The park is over 800 acres of greenery, among  a hustling, bustling city. We stopped at several places where many movies have been filmed, far too many to mention, but suffice it to say literally hundreds of movies have been filmed here. The picture here is the imagine Mosaic Donated to the city of New York in honor of John Lenon, who lived in the first building to the right of this Mosaic. 

We barely got off the bikes, that we had to rush for our appointment with the top of the Rock. We purchased tickets yesterday for this attraction and our time slot was 6:35pm so we quickly made our way down the 9-10 blocks to the Rockefeller centre and then waited for 10 min for our time slot! 

We finally did make it in there and once again were treated to a spectacular view of the city. This time a really nice view of Central park and it's 20 acre lake. So out of that building and into the subway we went. But not before Stephanie got to get a picture with Questlove, the Drummer from the Roots band who play nightly on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. This time, the real live version!

 


We caught the second to last ferry across to Jersey City and were starving. We stopped at a restaurant right by our marina, but they were full and had no seating for us. Once we got to the boat, we dropped our dinghy and rode across the channel to Surf City restaurant.

Not the dining experience we were hoping for but it did fill the hole in our tummy and we got to sit by the fire enjoying a drink as we closed off our evening.

By 10:30 pm we were all so exhausted nobody could keep their eyes open so we dropped into bed and into a sound sleep.  Hence why I did not post last night. I'm sure you will all forgive me!