Navigating NYC - Day 2

My husband and I are a fan of the Gray Line ‘City Sightseeing’ buses and have used
them in many cities around the world (when the more personal tuk-tuks are not available). So after another hearty breakfast, we tracked down a red-sweatered rep (not hard to find) and bought our tickets to ride.

There are a few different tour routes available: Downtown, Brooklyn, Uptown, Bronx and the Night tour. We decided to do the Downtown tour first and this took us through times square and then through Greenwich Village (One thing missing from the commentary was ‘Waverly Place’ which was exciting for me -a self-confessed Selena Gomez fan – to see.

The bus was a nice relaxing way to experience most of Downtown and after going through NYU Campus, SoHo and Chinatown we ended up near the World Trade Center memorial.

 We didn’t actually go into the memorial but did view the new additions to the site which was pretty impressive. It was very eerie to be there and to imagine what it must have been like in 2001.

This stop was the change over for the Brooklyn tour so we switched buses and headed over the bridge (not the Brooklyn bridge, the buses aren’t allowed as the Brooklyn Bridge isn’t fairing to well these days so we went over the Manhattan Bridge.) The Brooklyn tour lasts about an hour and takes you along the water’s edge to allow for awesome photos of the Manhattan skyline.

I liked Brooklyn, it was like a quieter little sister. So

after passing through the different parts (apologies as I don’t recall what they are called), we headed back over the bridge to the World Trade Center site.

My boss is a huge Ghostbuster’s fan and his only request of our trip was for us to visit the fire house where it was filmed. We looked on our map and saw it wasn’t too far a walk from where we were so we set off to find it. Much to our disappointment it was all closed up and under construction. So back we went the way we came.

We boarded the Downtown service again (heading back to Times Square). This passes through Wall Street and by Battery Park and a view of the river. We headed back up through the East Village where we are 98% sure we saw Jaden Smith.

The only downside to the bus tour is it is pretty hard to get any decent photos!

The bus tour goes by the United Nations building, 5th Avenue and the Rockerfeller Center and concludes just near our hotel.

By this point we were pretty hungry and decided to grab a Ruben from Majestic Deli on 7th Avenue. This sandwich was amazing. Deli’s are amazing! The sandwich, while overpriced in my opinion, was the best sandwich I have had and we were so full afterwards we couldn’t even manage dinner.

As we had spent most of the day on the bus, lunch came at around 5pm. As we had such a huge lunch we ended up falling asleep for a few hours. Not really feeling dinner we all has a massive slice of pizza from one of the Ray’s Pizza places, just so we could say we had a massive slice of pizza. We were all pretty spent so ended up just staying in and watching Saturday Night Live (something I’ve always wanted to do) but alas it was a repeat.

Day 2 was very visually stimulating and it was really cool to have visited so many places that I’ve only ever seen on the screen.