Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012: Day 2 – New York to Los Angeles

Surprise, surprise we woke early after two fire alarms in the night. Bit of a convoluted trip into the city via the hotel shuttle, the AirTrain and the Metro.  Now sat in Applebee’s having breakfast – the works with pancakes – cholesterol heaven. Lovely.

Decided to wander down Broadway taking pictures and living New York City rush hour.  Times Square was fairly quiet, and we have resisted Starbucks so far.  That lasted until about 9am!

We then took the subway down to WTC to avoid killing ourselves before the day had really started.  We looked around Battery City Park (the harbour behind WTC) where we found two local yatchs – one advertising the virtues of Edinburgh and one of Yorkshire.  Nice to see the UK represented in important events.

We arrived at the 9/11 Memorial Garden with a massive queue ahead of us.  The Billingham queue avoidance techniques had not been employed today so unusually for us we had to wait our turn.  The queue seem to move at a fair rate of knots so it wasn’t long before we could take in the atmosphere of Ground Zero.  They still haven’t finished the museum which will show the final structures that were standing after the terrible events of that day.  Looks like they haven’t made a lot of progress on that since Oct last year for some reason. 

The memorial is beautiful and I couldn’t help thinking that it was a highly fitting tribute to those that had lost their lives.  Everyone’s name is etched in the metal plinth that surrounds the pools of water.  Each pool has a still river of water that cascades down to a level below, which then disappears into a large square hole, of which the bottom is invisible.  The whole effect is to provide a strong impression of eternity.  I was fine reading all the names until I saw “Jennifer L Howker [or similar] and her unborn child”.

After an hour paying our respects we headed over to Chop’t in the Financial District which was as good as I remember – absolutely delicious salads made to order with totally fresh and wholesome ingredients.  Mexican Caesar salad went down a treat.  If we had this in the UK we would be a much healthier nation, and less a nation of fatties.

After lunch Mrs B started to whinge about her toe [yes well we’ve walked miles!] … So we had to pay another visit to Starbucks on the way back to the hotel.  We rediscovered Caramel Apple Spice which J introduced us to about 5 years ago. 

As we listened to the orders being called out we decided to start a little challenge for ourselves, which will become clear through the messages posted over the next month.  Save to say that Jim placed our order today…

Finally got back to the hotel and picked up our bags.  I forgot to mention that the bell man had the cheek to charge us $12 for storing our luggage for 8 hours.  Not pleased.  Anyway headed over to the airport and we are now settled in to the United lounge waiting for our flight to LA.

Stats for Day 2: 0 miles.

Plan for tomorrow is to pick up our car at LAX and start on our road trip.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012