Saturday, March 14, 2020

June 15, 2019 – New York City, NY – Sunny – 79F

What an interesting itinerary - New York City is our first stop as we make our way up the East Coast.  

We are both on tour today – “New York City – By Land and Sea”.  Shorex asked us to be in the Cabaret Lounge at 8:00 AM so I am up early enough to see the sail in – views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Jersey city, and Manhattan.  




We are docked at the Manhattan Sea Port (also here is the Norwegian Dawn).

Selma, a long time New Yorker, is our guide.  She is a little bit loopy, a little bit funny, and very knowledgeable. The bus took us about three blocks to an adjacent pier where we boarded our tour boat.  Because of the wind and sun, we sat on the inside by a semi-clean window.  The tour of Hudson River was underway.


 

When a picture was needed, I went out on the bow area to snap the shot.  From the ship, we got great pictures of just about everything along the Hudson River:  The Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum (featuring the aircraft carrier, Intrepid, the Space Shuttle, Enterprise, along with jets and submarines)

1 World Trade Center, 

the Empire State Building, 

the Statue of Liberty, 

the gleaming glass skyscrapers of Jersey City, 


and Ellis Island.  

We also saw floating billboards 


and the Colgate Clock. The Clock (50 feet in diameter) is all that is left of the headquarters of Colgate-Palmolive, which left in 1985.

The city is in massive building mode with skyscrapers being constructed everywhere.  The buildings are being made of glass and some have highly unusual shapes and configurations.  Some appear crooked, some are cantilevered, some look like spiral staircases.  We also saw a huge driving range that was open day and night (below).  A net keeps the balls from going into the river and I’m guessing that the balls float. 

We also were able to see Port Liberty, in Bayonne, NJ.  An RCL Cruiser (Port Liberty is where Royal Caribbean Ships depart from) was docked.

The tour of the river took about an hour with the only drawback being that I couldn’t understand a word the narrator was saying.

We made a stop at the 9/11 Memorial so we could see the two waterfall pools and the new monument dedicated to the First Responders, who are now ill and dying from toxic fumes and materials.  The monuments are stacks of rock slabs.  


I got some new pictures of the North Pool



and South Pool



and a picture of the totally completed 1 World Trade Center.  

The Oculus, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is now completed (the South Pool is in the foreground) and will be a hub for trains and subways - it looked like a pair of wings to me - it is an impressive structure.  

If we come back to NYC, we will go inside (more spectacular than the outside).

The tour took us through Times Square, 



Broadway, the Village, Hell’s Kitchen, 


- home to superheroes, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, Trump Tower, and Central Park, and Little Italy.  

We passed by Columbus Circle and the statue of Cristoforo Colombo.


We squeezed our way down to Wall Street to get a shot of the iconic Wall Street Bull.  There were so many tourists hanging out at the Statue, I could barely get a picture of it.

We also saw a structure that Selma called a Human Ant Farm – people walked up ramps to a honey-comb type structure (composed of stairs).  This activity is only for the very fit.

As we drove along, we saw a large gathering of people - some kind of demonstration - as we got closer I could see the signs - this was an anti-Trump demonstration.  It seemed orderly and one of the demonstrators was decked out as Captain America.


Selma was very good at finding routes that would minimize the traffic crunch. She kept on barking driving instructions to our driver, who responded quickly to find open traffic. Very New York.

It was a very good tour.

No Showtime tonight.

Clocks move one hour forward tonight to put us on Halifax Time.

It was warm enough to watch the sail away on the open deck – it was a magnificent sail out.  The buildings were starting to turn on their lights – amazing.  I also got an amazing panorama shot of NYC.



















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