New York, New York

We decided to take advantage of our lack of employment to spend five days checking out New York City.  The flights were cheap - $300 each return despite it being over Thanksgiving weekend.  We were amazed when we turned up at Pearson International to discover that our plane was a tiny little thing - 3 seats per row.  Nevertheless, we arrived safely after less than an hour in the air, and headed into our midtown Manhattan hotel by subway.

We brought the hotel address, but Eleventh Ave was a long street, our map had no numbers, and we'd forgotten to bring the cross-street.  It wasn't until we'd walked a long way that we realised that the hotel named "Ink48" was on the corner of 48th street.  Duh!

New York hasn't been quite as I was expecting - I had in mind this sort of Coruscant-like area of tall buildings from horizon to horizon, and it's not like that at all.  There are plenty of smaller apartment blocks and shops - there's even a Toyota dealership next to our hotel.  It was a little disappointing!  The centre of the city does look just like the movies though.

We hit up Central Park in the afternoon.  It's huge - we spent hours walking around and still only made it to halfway up.

The park was full of beautiful little paths meandering through woods and lawns.

The autumn colours were out in force - it's quite a few degrees warmer in New York than in Toronto.

In the evening we went up to the top of the Rockefeller Center (Top of the Rock) to check out the city lights - it was beautiful if a little scary being so high and with the knowledge of what happened to previous tall New York buildings.

The next day we headed to see the USS Intrepid - an aircraft carrier from the Second World War that's been turned into a museum.  It wasn't bad (although I wouldn't recommend the audio tour) - I was a little disappointed that you could only see three decks of the ship rather than the full complement of them.

On the lower decks we saw the mess and some of the crew living quarters - sleeping right next to someone with someone else's feet in your face would be pretty rough.

The flight deck was covered in planes, including this Harrier.  The Harrier has the ability to take off and land vertically, but for planes that don't, they described how it works - the runway on a carrier is very short, so the planes are launched by using power from the engine to basically slingshot them off the edge of the ship.  And when they land, they hang an "arrestor hook" from the back of the plane - basically a hook that catches wires that stretch across the deck - and when the hook catches, the plane stops.  It's some very cool engineering.

The Intrepid was involved in picking up some of the returning astronaut capsules from the initial earth orbit missions - they had a replica, and Stephen decided to play astronaut.  

In the afternoon we hit up Macy's for some hardcore shopping - clothes are incredibly cheap here, and that's not even waiting for the Black Friday sales.  I picked up two pairs of label jeans, a winter coat and a jumper for around $210.  That would buy me a pair of jeans and lunch in Australia.

Our feet are sore and we're pretty exhausted - it's a pretty big place to walk around.  Tomorrow, the plan is to take a visit to the Statue of Liberty and perhaps the Museum of Natural History, before Thanksgiving on Thursday.