Final Stop.

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As I write this, tomorrow our last full day in New York, the day after we leave and head back to England - and our epic journey comes to an end. It's very sad!! I am looking forward to being at home and seeing everyone and showing off pictures but another part of me just wants to keep on going round and round the world!

But anyway - New York - we've had three full days here - spent neatly split between three sections of Manhatten - downtown, midtown and uptown. At downtown we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge which was cool, and checked out buildings round there like the City Hall. We then got on the (free) Staten Island Ferry which conveniently sails right past the Statue of Liberty so penny pinchers like me and Ames don't have to pay to go up to it!! Once in Staten Island we got the ferry right back! We then strolled to the World Trade Centre site.... what can you say about visiting there?? Undoubtedly the site of the most important event in recent world history - there is a huge void in downtown Manhatten where these buildings used to be. Midtown - we went to Times Square, Grand Union Station, Chrysler Building, a few of the big stores like Macy's and we went up the top of the Empire State Building. Even though it was a bit hazy the fews from up top are fantastic. The best thing about the building though is the lift - it goes up and down at a floor every second!! That's amazing - it's like freefalling!! But then when you're going up 86 floors you need a fast lift! Finally uptown was a slack day - we went to a market on 7th Avenue taking advantage of cheap street food and then spent a good few hours in Central Park - watching Baseball, went to Strawberry Fields (John Lennon memorial) and just enjoyed the peace and quiet as New York is a very busy,hot and sweaty city!

We have gone on two trips out of New York - the first was a 2 day visit to Niagara Falls. Which were awesome - not quite as tall as I expected but the amount of water, the noise and the water vapour kicked up by the falls is fantastic! We went over to the Canada side of the falls which meant another stamp in the passport and better views of the falls and in the morning we went on the Maid of the Mist for some very close-up, wet and windy views of the falls. At the base of the falls you get a good impression of how powerful they are!

Second trip was a 3 day to Washington - just to have a nose at the nations capital. Did all the main sites - White House (but couldn;t go in), Lincoln Memorial, Washington Memorial and Capitol Hill (which we did manage to go in) and they were all cool. The one place I was really looking forward to was visiting the FBI building but that was closed till 2007 - bummer! The capitol is actually a very nice place, the city is all spread out with lots of England style squares and green spaces to get away from the cars. There is even a roundabout in Washington - the first i've seen America in 3 weeks and for anyone who has seen National Lampoons European Vacation, Americans do actually get that confused on a roundabout!!

And so that's it. The final blog of our World Tour 2006. It's all been fantastic - every single second (apart from those on the toilet in Delhi and Agra I guess!!) - been just a once-in-a-lifetime experience that i'm very very glad I got to do. Until World Tour 2007!

See you all soon.

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Photos

View of New York
taken from Central Park