Back in The City

Friday, September 20th.
Interior.
The tv lounge again. This time the level of activity is greater. The tv is showing a Houston-Florida baseball game, a woman is on the phone with her daughter and four RVers are sitting around a small card table exchanging life stories.

The campground we've found here is really great. The people that work here are really nice (as opposed to the last place we stayed) and it has everything that anyone could wish for. We've already taken advantage of the tv-lounge, the nice bathroom with the piped-in music from the local soft rock radio station and the nice showers. We have yet to use the the game room, the extensive camp store and the laundry room. And unfortunately the pool is closed down for the winter... But other than that this is by far the nicest place we've stayed so far.

And we found out that the campground also arranges its own day tours into New York, complete with bus ride and guide. Although we're not really big on organized tours like that we liked the idea of not having to worry about transportation at all and still get to see several of the sights that we wanted to see. So we popped the cash for the tour, got up at 6 o'clock this morning (after less than 5 hours of sleep) and got on the bus.

Aside from the tour guide, who was a nice and knowledgable girl a couple of years older than us, everyone on the bus was over 40 years old. But they were all really nice people. It took about an hour and a half on the turnpike to get into the city. Once there we drove all the way down to the southern part of Manhattan to take the ferry across to Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty. The statue is a true icon of liberty and freedom and seeing it in real life was pretty neat. Unfortunately, because of all the security aftermath of 9/11, all access to the statue itself has been closed down. So all we could do was walk around it on the island. We'd looked forward to going up to see the view from the crown so it was a bit disappointing. But we were there...

We unfortunately also had to pass up the new Immigrant Museum on Ellis Island since the 3+ hour walk through the museum didn't fit into the tour program. Back on Manhattan we walked up to see Ground Zero. Not having been to New York before we had nothing to compare it to, but it was very surrealistic to see a huge void in the middle of the city and imagine what was there just a year ago. What should be there. The flowers and flags and personal notes pinned to the fence all around the site were a sad reminder that at that very spot 3,000 people lost their lives last year.

We split up for lunch and we found the best pizza we've ever had at the mall at South Street Seaport. New Yorkers definitely seem to be as busy as their reputation will have it, but the time they spend making pizza is well spent! After lunch we headed up to the Empire State Building for that famous million dollar view from the 86th floor observatory. The view really was great, but unfortunately (and that's the very problem with organized tours) we didn't have enough time there to really appreciate the view from all corners of the deck. After a short stop at the hectic Times Square we headed back out of town. One of the most amazing things we saw all day was the way the bus driver managed to drive that bus around town without hitting anything. New York driving should definitely be left to professionals.

So while a self-paced tour would have given us more time for some of the things that we'd choose to spend more time at this tour had given us a chance to see some of the big sights and to see several of the different neighborhoods in the city. The bus trip definitely did not conclude our tour of New York but was rather an appetizer for our own expeditions into the city.