Saturday 8th July – NYC by bus

We had been fore-warned that the open-top bus tour that came with our NYC pass could only be used during a 24-hour timeframe.  Today seemed to be the best opportunity to use the service to see as much of the City with minimum walking.

A typical NYC bus-top view!

The Dakota Building

We queued at Madame Tussauds for our bus tickets and hopped on the uptown loop for starters.  The whole loop would have taken a couple of hours even if we didn’t alight anywhere (that’s NYC traffic for you!) so we picked our choice of stop as carefully as possible deciding to visit Central Park.  Jumping off by John Lennon’s old home and the location he was shot, the Dakota building (right), we crossed into Central park into the Strawberry fields zone before having a stroll around and enjoying some of the scenery.  

The John Lennon Memorial in Strawberry Fields, Central Park

Hard to believe this is in the center of one of the most built-up cities on earth...

How many turtles can you see?

Ah, there's the City..

As fans of the 'Night at the Museum' films we were happy to stumble across the American museum of National History

The Guggenheim Museum

Back on the bus the uptown loop continued to take us past numerous museums and landmarks, through Harlem and circled past the New York City Library before we reached the bus exchange.  It was 1pm by now and after grabbing a quick coffee we transferred on to the downtown bus loop which took us south towards the tip of Manhattan.   

The Plaza Hotel - one of the most filmed hotels in the world

New York City Library - as seen in the film Ghostbusters (most importantly)

The Flatiron building

The Charging Bull (AKA the Wallstreet Bull) among the crowds

We had used the bus as much as we could today, if we wanted to achieve much else we were going to have to walk it.  We jumped off to catch the Staten Island ferry which is a sneaky free way of getting a ride past the Statue of liberty close enough to get reasonable pictures.   

View back towards Manhatten from the Staten Island Ferry

Statue of Liberty with tourists and boats for scale and (below) this is how close we got!

At Staten Island we had a little wait to catch the return ferry so by the time we returned to Manhattan it was about 630pm.  No time for a breather, we got our first experience of using the Subway to reach the 9/11 memorial and museum.  In an error completely on my part, I’d managed to buy NYC Passes that didn’t include the museum, which was a shame as we had worked out all of our spending around which 5 attractions we wanted to use the passes for.  Not knowing when or if we would get back we felt we had to see it.  However, we didn’t do a great job of our time management around the museum – there was so much to see! I know that it is important to remember the victims from such a massive tragedy but I felt like I was re-living a lot of the news broadcasts and images that I had already seen so many times both at the time and on documentaries since.  It is a mortifying experience.   

Back to true form, we were shown out of the museum at 9pm closing with the aim of visiting the memorial:

It was lucky that we managed that fleeting photograph as, after a brief glimpse, we were moved on from there as it was closing as well! We had rushed around as many attractions as we could in a day and now we were exhausted.

Having heard how simple it is to use the subway system, we really struggled, mostly because many of the most popular tourist lines were closed all weekend for work.  We had to ask for help and took a really convoluted route, finally getting back near our hotel and grabbing a beer and a burger before bed.  What a day!