3 Days in New York, off which one with camera.

When you travel as much as I do, you earn airline points. When you use the „correct“ credit card to pay for your travels, you earn even more points, and even better, you get 2 for 1 airline ticket every year.

When you spend more time at hotels than at home, for periods, you earn hotel points as well. This means you are need to use all those points and are forced to travel every now and then, what a pity.

Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan

Neither me or Birna had been to New York before and we wanted to make that our next destination, but we struggled finding suitable weekend. We do have quite busy everyday, active kid´s doing sports, music and theatre. In periods, more or less every weekend is booked for f event you can’t miss, mandatory voluntary work in between etc. and it was difficult to find time to travel. We decided to go to NY in the spring time but we struggled finding the good time. We settled the date after rebooking couple of times. We becoming quite “good” friends with the booking agents for the hotel and airline due to constant reschedule but now we were looking forward to a nice long weekend away.

Manhattan

Departure day came and we headed to the airport. We were relaxed and ready for few days away, together, the first one for quite some time. At the airport, when checking in, the girl behind the counter told us we were not able to check in, we had no visa, we realized that we totally forgot to apply for visa to be able to enter the US. This came as a shock, we thought we had to go back home and drop our USA trip, but she calmed us down, gave us a URL where we could apply online and it just took few minutes. The first adrenaline rush of this trip was over.

View from the Chrysler Building

The flight was nice in a brand-new airplane. We were upgraded one class and to celebrate for the new fleet the crew treated the passengers extra well.

Statue of Liberty

After arriving NY, checking into the nice hotel close to Time Square, we went out and had a bite to eat before heading to bed. At the restaurant my camera was stolen but I didn’t realize that until the day after, this was the second shock. I was in NY for the first time and didn’t even have camera with me. When I calmed down I was pretty sure the insurance would cover the loss, so I decided to buy new camera asap.

Manhattan Bridge and Upper Manhattan.

We started the first day just wandering around in the neighbourhood and headed downtown. We were on our way to the Highline in 34th street and B&H, the world´s best photography shop was close by. I went into the huge shop, found the camera that I had dreamt about for a while at a very good price. If you know me well, you know I need to think at least twice before I buy something expensive and it was not different this time. I decided to give it a thought while we walked the Highline, through Greenwich Village and China town.

We had a very nice long walk, and on the way back I stopped at B&H again to invest in new fantastic camera. It was just after 1400 on Friday and it came to my surprise, they had already closed the store. Even worse, the shop was closed on Saturday. I should have noticed when I was there earlier the same day that the shop is owned and run by Jewish people and I should have known that their “Sunday” is on Saturdays.

I investigated other options, found another shop that had the same camera on similar price but when I visited the shop I realized this was a small shop that looked shaky. The price appeared to be very different than what they announced on their web site so I decided to be patient, be without camera and go back to B&H on Sunday.

We had a nice, relaxed days in New Yort but we walked long distances around the whole Manhattan. As mentioned earlier, walked the Highline which is an old elevated railway track that was used in industry that has been changed into a very beautiful park with 2,5 km long walking path that ends in Greenwich Village. We walked further through Chinatown, Little Italy. We walked around Lower Manhattan went to the 9/11 Memorial and decided to join the queue into the Museum. We were in doubt if we should go into the museum but realized it was something we did not want to miss.

View from Chrysler Building.

On the Sunday morning I was at B&H just after the shop opened, bought my camera. I met Birna in the neighbourhood and we kept on exploring the city, mostly walking.

Central Park was in walking dinstance from the hotel and we spent some time walking around the park. It was very interesting to experience the contrast, walking from the few meters from one of the busiest cities in the world into a quiet park that could be in the countryside.

Although Birna is extremely afraid of heights she joined me to the top of Chrysler building, fantastic view but I think she agrees.

In the afternoon we had a dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Little Italy and took the metro from there over to Brooklyn where I wanted to try out my new camera around sunset. We spent couple of hours walking by the waterfront and enjoyed the view over Manhattan, had a wonderful time.

We headed home the day after, tired after walking long distances every. At the airport we discovered an app on the phone that logged your movements and we realized we had walked well over 60 km in the 3 days we spent in NY. No wonder we were tired.