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Published: August 26th 2010
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NY Central Park
Flying over the Hudson River with Central Park on our left. As I mentioned in my first blog entry..."In the beginning were the plans..." my wife, Felicity & I had purchased business class round the world tickets for our base journey, but we are backpackers nonetheless.
For some, backpacks and business class don't mix and so it seemed with our Swiss Check-in lady at Zurich airport on 9th July 2010, who told us we had to go a get our own plastic carrying boxes from a desk down the check-in hall if we were going to check-in backpacks. It seems like in her mind we'd failed the business class suitability test.
Zurich Airport is a great airport - regularly voted the best in Europe - but abandon all hope (of getting to a lounge) all ye who are flying to the USA. We never realised that the assumption is you'll spend so much time going through security checks there will never be enough time leftover to need to wait in a lounge. Maybe this will change or we were just unlucky but if you happen to be on a business class out of Zurich to the US - check with the airline how you should get to the lounge that avoids
Manhattan
With the Empire State building in the centre. the 3 trips through security that we endured.
The eight and a half hour Swiss flight on a new A330 to New York JFK from Zurich was largely uneventful. We managed to get some sleep on board as we knew we had a two and a half hour drive at the other end - starting at what would be close to Midnight Swiss time.
I have flown in to JFK many times over the last 20 years, but the one thing that remains the same is the pain that the USA 'welcome wagon' insists on inflicting. July 9th 2010 was no different. Our aircraft parked at the gate at 15:30. But we spent the next 90 minutes queuing up for immigration and queuing up for customs, before queuing up for a sky train which would allow us to join a queue to claim our Budget rental car.
It was almost 3 hours later (at 18:30) that we managed to enter our Guilford Connecticut destination into our GPS and leave in our Dodge(y) car....the meaning of the 'y' will become apparent in the 'New England and New Hamster' Blog.
The drive from JFK to Guilford was pretty
Abeam the Empire State building
A close-up view of the Empire State over the wing of our PA-28 straight forward, with the help of this newly acquired Garmin Nuvi 1200 GPS gadget. For a terminally navigationally challenged individual like myself such toys are a god send...and the bizarreness of the English lady's road name pronunciation is quite entertaining too.
We arrived at our friends house in Guilford, CT at a little after 20:45 local time. The house was empty with no lights on - had our English GPS lady led us to the wrong place ? No as it turned out our friends Francis and Susanne and family had decamped to a lovely barbecue place just up the road - and who could blame them it really did look great. We joined them at the local ice cream parlour...when in the USA do what the locals do...and had a great end to the evening.
Guilford, CT lies on the coast just North of New Haven. Like many Connecticut towns it has a pretty little beach with great facilities. Saturday morning we headed there to burn off the ice cream from the night before. But the weather had other ideas and Atlantic storms started heading our way once we arrived. After a brief dip in the sea
and a wander around the nature reserve, mother nature pointed us in the direction of the local US Storm Shelter, otherwise known as "the Mall". There we bought US (ie huge) quantities of fabulous lobster, beef and other tasties for the fraction of the price in Switzerland and had a great barbecue in the evening. A great first day. But the next day was to be even better.
Francis is not only an accomplished paediatrician, but also an accomplished private pilot. Felicity and I had flown with him on trips around Switzerland, France and Italy. Spectacular though those were, Sunday's trip eclipsed all of them. We hired a small PA-28 Piper Cherokee from New Haven Tweed Airport and flew south down the Hudson River past La Guardia airport and onwards past Central Park, Manhattan and Ground Zero on our left before flying over 'the Lady' (Statue of Liberty) and turning northwards past Coney Island at about 200 feet with commercial jets flying over the top of us into JFK. In the New York area this was under the strict control of La Guardia, JFK and Newark Air Traffic control who were really helpful and accommodating. We returned to New
Ground Zero
A monument to the World Trade Center twin tours and September 11th 2001 Haven over Long Island Sound. The photographs below are some of those that we took during the flight.
Guilford, CT is a very pretty New England town and we were lucky to catch the annual 4th July fireworks...on the 11th July. We thought it would be a small town affair - but nothing is really small in the US of A and these fireworks were no exception. I toop a short video of them and hope to attach it to this blog when internet connection speeds allow.
On Monday morning we slowly said our goodbyes to Guilford and headed out on our own to check out some of the other parts of new England, heading in the end to New Hampshire (or "New Hamster" as another good friend of ours who we were scheduled to visit lovingly calls it). Find out how we got on in the next blog.
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