Part of my interest in visiting the Gunks for climbing was also the possibility of seeing perhaps the most famous city in the world, New York…
New York did not disappoint. It is of course “just another city”, so we’re unlikely to ever return, preferring to save the holiday days for climbing and other adventures. Therefore, our single day in the big apple was gonna be big to take in all of our must-see sights!
Staying in a hotel in Manhattan is expensive so we found an interesting B&B on Staten Island. I say “interesting” for several reasons. First, it wasn’t a “B&B”, it was in fact a “B&nB”. That is, Bed & no-Breakfast come Gallery run by a slightly eccentric and very New-York-American artist. Second, we thought it would be fun to stop in what looked like quite authentic accommodation, it turned out to be a bit weird and run down. And thirdly, our host back in Ellenville (who came from New York) said “Staten Island! Why are you staying there?!” when we told her about our onward travel plans. Was it an unsafe place? No, it turns out that her concern was because Staten Island is firmly “Trump Land”, while New York is largely Democrat. However, she did concede that the views of Manhattan from the free Staten Island Ferry would be amazing.
Liberty
We arrived early enough on our first of two nights in New York with enough time to tick-off one of our top tourist sights, the Statue of Liberty. We parked at Liberty State Park and caught the ferry to Liberty Island…
Manhattan
Early the next morning we headed off to the Staten Island Ferry terminal to catch the free ferry to Manhattan. How incredible is it that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, there’s a free 25 minute ferry ride from Staten Island to Manhattan? I can’t get my head around the economics of the city laying on such a service completely for free.
The weather was poor, it was raining quite heavily. But it was forecast to improve throughout the day with clear skies by late afternoon. Good job, our programme of sight seeing involved over 36km of walking to visit all the locations on our tick list.
As we trekked north from Lower Manhattan we stopped for tea and cake. It’s never too early for cake!
Mind you, $39 for two cups of earl grey tea and this single slice of cake to share, maybe that was the most naughty thing?
Prices
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that prices in the US were high. I’m not sure if this is a function of the exchange rates at the moment (approx. $1.2 = £1) or what, but everything was very expensive. It used to be the case that trips to US were eased by most stuff being cheaper than at home. I’ve been to North America before and come home with a full set of Black Diamond cams they were so much cheaper than in the UK. However, this most certainly is not the case any longer. For example, rock shoes were a minimum of $199. That’s about £170 when you add tax. One can find the same shoes for about £140 in the UK.
Food definitely used to be plentiful and cheaper in the US, especially when eating out. That ain’t the case either, for example we were regularly paying nearly $40 for two coffees and two small breakfast sandwiches. Basically, all forms of eating out – and in – are expensive.
Back on our sight-seeing track our next location was the World Trade Centre complex…
Obviously this is not actually him, but it was equally as laughable!
To visit the Empire State Building booking tickets for a given time-slot is mandatory. Although unless it is super busy there are vending machines in the entrance to buy tickets on arrival if you don’t mind hanging around for a slot with availability. We had bought tickets though for the first of the “sunset” time-slots. These are a few dollars more. With hind-sight I would have bought the last of the pre-sunset tickets and saved those few dollars as it turns out that once you are inside you can hang out for as long as you like. We were there for over two hours making sure we took in the seriously impressive Manhattan skyline in all directions both in daylight and in darkness…
The tour of the Empire State Building includes loads of information stops that go through the history, construction, filmography, etc. of this famous building. Here’s a shot from one fun point of the tour. King Kong was animated complete with circling bi-planes as-if from the black and white 1933 movie…
After the Empire State Building tour we set about trekking back to the Staten Island Ferry terminal. It was a long and tough walk with sore feet from many kilometres and hours of walking around Manhattan! We stopped for dinner in SoHo. Again, expensive, but it was another of our objectives to have a steak in Manhattan. 😉 Note, we’d already enjoyed a New York Pizza on Staten Island the night before. 🙂
Brooklyn Bridge
After our final night in our unique Staten Island B&nB we had time to visit the Brooklyn Bridge before heading back to JFK and home. The weather was now sunny in contrast to our previous rainy day trekking around Manhattan…
One final breath of air at the beautiful Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on the way to JFK, an incredible juxtaposition against the ultra built-up multilayered concrete and stone landscape of New York…
Series - Gunks
- Shawangunks
- New York