The Big Apple

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Wow, what a day! It began with an awful night as we crossed from deep to shallow water. The sea got very lumpy and at 5 o'clock this morning we gave up trying to sleep and ordered our first brew of the day. We watched out for wildlife quite a bit this morning and saw about 6 birds and managed to miss the 2 whales who were spotted on the other side of the ship. But from that point on it just got better and better. We could smell New York long before we could see it. Fully expected it to smell of either traffic or burgers, but it actually smells very sweet. Almost like popcorn or a vanilla scented Yankey Candle! Sailing past the Statue of Liberty was so exciting and then we cruised up the Hudson River past Manhatten and its amazing skyline. They opened up an extra bit of deck - the bit you can see from Cunard's web cam on the ship - so we went up front and waved. Mega unlikely any of you saw us but at least we tried!

Clearing Customs was interesting. The guy in front of us got sniffed out by the food sniffing dog and they found a smuggled orange on him! But blow the orange, the dog was sooooo cute! He got a treat from his handler and then got clever and sniffed the same guy out from the queue again a while later. But no treat this time. The dog was clever but his handler was even cleverer! So now we have both been finger printed for the first time in our lives and the lovely Customs officer gave us each a US Immigration stamp in our passport. Wonder how many we'll manage to collect by the time we come home.

Our arrival in New York was in pretty horrid weather. Although it was warm (about 6 degrees today), it was very misty and pouring with rain too. This afternoon we'd booked to go on a bus and river trip round Manhatten and really hit lucky. It stopped raining just as we boarded our water taxi and then the sun came out and we got the most wonderful views of Manhatten, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty and under both the Brooklyn and Manhatten bridges. Sunset was really spectacular and I think Richard managed to get some really lovely photographs. We then spent a bit of time at the South Street Sea Port before taking a great bus trip around Manhatten. We saw all the important sights including even a building which was well and truly on fire! We left the bus early so that we could visit the Rockefeller Centre. The skating rink was very popular and there were many more people on that than there were up on the 67th floor observation platform. Night had fallen and the views were seriously spectacular. The 'Top of the Rock' is opposite the Empire State Building which is high up - excuse the pun! - on our list of places to visit tomorrow. We then walked several blocks over to the Grand Central Terminus which is where several movies have been filmed - including the pram falling down the staircase in The Untouchables. It's a beautiful building and we had a great dinner in the food court there.

After that we got a yellow cab back to the ship. And everything we'd heard about New York cab drivers appears to be true. They're rubbish - or at least this one was! He had no idea how to get to the ship piers, shouted at us for not knowing which way he should go ... which we told him seemed odd 'cos we'd only just arrived from England and he lived there and works there as a cab driver! It seemed very odd behaviour to us but in the end he got us pretty close to the ship and we were able to walk the last little bit. Now it's back to our cabin for a brew, a bit of blogging, write some postcards and then off to bed. We want to be up early in the morning for a fat boy's breakfast, a break away from the gym, and back into the Big Apple.

As you might have worked out already; we had a pretty good day today!

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