Day 3 in New York
Woke to a cold rainy day. Wish we hadn't gone shopping the day before, as today would have been perfect, but as I had already booked tickets for the 9/11 memorial we had to do that today.
Plans for the day: 9/11 memorial, staten island ferry, police museum and Brooklyn Bridge. Did we achieve all that? Nope, ran out of time and as per every other day our feet were killing us!
Managed to negotiate the subway - other than finding the correct place to enter the subway (we somehow kept managing to enter for the uptown entrance when we wanted to go downtown) it was easy.
When you come out of the subway, you can instantly see the new twin towers that they are building:
You are just round the corner from the preview centre, which we went into, and also St Pauls Church which we looked around. I had only gone in there to use the bathroom (there are none at the 9/11 memorial, it warns you on the tickets) and I didn't know that inside the church was dedicated to that date, so I'm glad we went in. Some of the displays made me feel very emotional for my fallen colleagues and all the people that lost their lives. I lit a candle inside the church. Here are some of the displays:
Our entry time was for 12.00pm, so we walked down to the site and joined the queue around 11.30am with no problem. It was a long queue, as you go through airport type security, but it moves fairly quickly. Probably took us about half an hour to get to security.
Once inside the site we didn't actually spend that much time there, probably about 20 minutes just looking at the two pools and the names inscribed round them. The pools are very big, but have quite a calming relaxing effect. I was really pleased that we had gone to see the site:
From there we walked to the police museum, stopping on route at a deli and having what can only be described as the most expensive salad in the world - $43 for 3 drinks and 3 boxes of hot/cold salad, I was staggered! Back to the unhealthy junk food for us, its half the price!
On the way to the police museum we passed the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry, which I had planned to go on. However, by now it was around 2pm, the weather was still fairly miserable, and we had already seen the Statue of Liberty from the Cruise Ship, so I decided to abandon my idea of going on the ferry and carry on the the police museum.
The museum was great, and we even all got a discount for me being a serving officer in England (I had taken my warrant card just in case!). Quite small within, although 3 floors, but really interesting.
Would you let this prisoner out...........!!
The line up:
They had a lot of displays of old handcuffs, weapons, batons, guns etc plus how uniforms had changed through the ages. There was also a kids interactive area which my two loved playing in despite being rather too old!
We had a good look round the shop which I thought was very reasonable and the kids brought some presents for their friends, and I bought the obligatory NYPD jumper to wear at home (not on duty!!).
From here we headed to (I think) the Seaport area (don't have a map to check!) and see the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, I had wanted to walk across it, as I'm told the view of the city is amazing, but it was still raining, and kids were getting a but moaney by this point that their feet hurt (and so did mine in fairness), so we abandoned this idea and I contented myself with a picture of them in front of the bridge!
We asked a friendly policeman where the nearest subway was, and it was a little walk, so took a slow stroll to it, only to find when we got there we had walked in a huge circle and ended up back where we had got off in the morning. Anyway, got the subway back easily enough, dropped our things off at the hotel and had a bit of a rest.
Decided to go out for dinner - I was sick to death of subway and pizza, and didn't want the kids having McDonalds yet again, so we went to Ellens Stardust Diner, which I had seen loads of reviews of that said it was great. It was only a block or so away from our hotel, so a couple of minutes walk. All the wait staff basically want to be "discovered" as singers/actors, and their dream is to be in a Broadway Show. In between taking orders and delivering food to customers, they get up on the furniture and sing songs, all of which was brilliant entertainment! Here is our waitress doing her thing:
The food was lovely, and the desserts were amazing (but very large, be aware!). We had a great time eating here and were thoroughly entertained by all the singing. I would highly recommend it.
After dinner Izzy was desperate to go to Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch to spend her money which was burning a hole in her pocket, so I let Dom walk back to the hotel as he really didn't want to shop, whilst Izzy was in teenage girl heaven in these stores! All I could think of is why don't they put more lights on - I'm obviously getting old and don't understand why it is "cool" to sell overpriced designer goods in a dark shop!! Anyway, Izzy was happy, it didn't take too long, then we went back to the hotel and were all in bed and asleep by 9.30p!!