New York

In New York we had planned three days of sightseeing and parked at the long term parking at JFK – expecting that it would be the best place to park the van (the van is too high for parking garages and we thought it would be reasonably safe).

There’s a lot more in New York than you can see in three days of course, and while the distances between things are a lot shorter than I expected and it was pretty easy to walk around, we still walked a lot (and took the subway). The city is really interesting and we ended up staying for pretty much all our driving day to Washington, DC (started to drive from JFK at 9pm) sightseeing.

As you probably know, none of us are morning people, which I think was a good thing here. While it is not just a “by night” city, like Las Vegas, there is still a lot to see and experience in the evenings. We got dinner at “BaBBO” (a Mario Batali restaurant) and a very interesting Mexican and Japanese fusion restaurant called Citrus, where we had Margaritas to go with our Sushi; sounds weird, tastes good! The third evening we got the fastest pizza ever as we didn’t have much time. We had a cheese and bread lunch at the Chelsea market, walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, visited the Metropolitan, walked in Central Park, shopped at 5th Avenue and Times Square, and visited the Queensboro Bridge Market (renovated by Terence Conran, the british design guru).

On the way down Broadway, Monday evening, we decided to see if we could get tickets to “Mamma Mia” the following evening – which we did. In the end the show probably was the highlight of the visit to New York for Felix. He just loved it.

Another highlight for Felix was the ride up the Empire State building at night. We mentioned the first night that we might want to do it, and he didn’t talk about much else than that for until we finally did it around 11pm Monday evening. The view from the 86th floor is really spectacular. Since I had decided not to bring the tripod into the city the night photos are limited!

We could both spend a lot longer in this city since there is so much more to see, but it is noisy and while I liked the hotel we stayed in we probably would need a quieter place to rest if staying for longer. Single pane windows (Dansk: Enkelt lags glas / Deutsch: Einfachverglasung) are just not keeping enough noise out and it was probably not the most restful nights we have had on the trip.

After leaving the city, way too late, and catching the last round of food at Applebee’s we bailed out and found a random hotel just outside Philadelphia. We should have driven to Washington DC, but we were both too tired to even attempt that. We got a pretty quiet night and the next morning we slept very late.