The City as Seen From the Bus

We decided this would be an "easy" day and we'd ride the tour bus. For $54, you can ride the tour buses for 48 hours and "hop on and hop off". I've done it twice before and love it. We did the Downtown Loop first and the guide was not the best. She was hard to understand with a heavy foreign accent and had a little trouble translating some things. We think we're going to do it again tomorrow and hopefully get a guide who speaks Arkansas English!!

After a quick lunch, we got on the Uptown Loop and that guy was great! Learned so much trivia on this trip. We had planned to get off about halfway through and catch the Brooklyn loop but were enjoying the guide so much and the buses were so crowded we were afraid we wouldn't get to sit together or even sit up on top so we stayed with the uptown.

We ate an early dinner and walked around for a couple hours before taking the Nighttime Loop. We spent some time in Times Square AGAIN (we've about had enough of it) plus they have a good bathroom at the Visitor's Center! There are still a lot of people here but certainly not as many as in the summer.

We had another good guide for the Nighttime Loop. He was born and raised in NYC. The best part of this trip is that they take you to Brooklyn and stop along the East River and you can see the Manhattan skyline. I could sit and look at it all night. It is absolutely gorgeous!! There was an almost full moon tonight too that peeked through every now and then. It was a little cloudy. Anyway, I used up the rest of the battery in the video camera on that. It's harder to see the buildings at night on the tour and since the traffic is "lighter", we don't have to sit in traffic and hear more trivia.

After getting off the tour, we had to walk several blocks to the subway. We were walking past a Junior's which is famous for its cheesecake so, of course, we had to make sure they weren't lying! It was worth every calorie!! It was so fluffy and yummy! It was 9:00 before we got back to our apartment which is our curfew for ourselves. Like I said earlier, we're on the edge of possibly being a "non-stellar" area. There are usually 2 policemen on the corner of our block. They seem to work in twos out here. The guys two houses down from us are usually out on their stoops partying when we come home.

My special comment for the day is about shoes. Since you don't want to make eye contact on the trains, you spend a lot of time looking down. I'm not a shoe person (just give me a good pair of tennis shoes any day and I'm happy) so it's interesting to see how many different kinds there are and what people wear. Seeing what people wear is so different than in Little Rock!!

So, since we mostly rode buses today, we only walked 5.98 miles today! Tomorrow morning we'll go to Battery Park and catch the bus for the Brooklyn Loop and then probably go back and do the Downtown Loop again if the weather holds out. There is a possibility of rain tomorrow afternoon.

Sorry no pictures tonight but I need to upload them. I can't believe we've been here 11 days already! Time is going so fast and there are so many things left to do (including laundry). Good night for now.

Linda and Conrad