All good things have to come to an end! Today was the day that we left New York to travel home at the end of our twelve weeks away. You'll not be surprised to hear that a good part of the morning was taken up with packing. This was quite a challenge as we had each been travelling with an extra bag, the contents of which had to be packed into the airline permitted number of bags. Eventually we had the success of everything packed - we couldn't check if the bags we...

We started the day catching up on some blog writing. You might think that a waste of our precious New York time but we knew that we had a long and packed day planned, with a rendezvous with the Empire State Building about 5:30pm, and that devoting an hour or two (it always takes longer than we expect) to the blog was a good way to pace the day. Our day's excursions started with the subway to Grand Central Station to view its architecture and to have lunch. As eve...

On Friday we decided to explore slightly further afield than Manhattan so after breakfast we took the subway to Brooklyn Bridge, not far from the apartment but we wanted to save our legs for the walking we had planned in Brooklyn. Dave ended up carrying a rucksack as rain was forecast and we needed our brolly, waterproofs etc. It wasn't raining as we began our walk over the bridge to Brooklyn and although the sky was overcast the bridge afforded new views of lowe...

A dull day was forecast - how wrong can you get?! New York does not do dull! We headed for the subway and uptown to Times Square today. Coming up from the dim light in the subway straight out onto the glitz of Times Square is quite an experience in itself. Dave's first experience of Times Square had him trying to look everywhere at once and he found it hard to take it all in without wide angle eyes. We'd headed for Times Square first to check out how to buy disco...

We hadn't had time to shop yesterday for breakfast ingredients so had to live the American way and go out for breakfast today. Jake, our airbnb host, had told us about Cafe Berkli Parc that turned out to be a good choice. We had nice yoghurt and granola with fresh fruit and good coffee. It was good value and friendly with communal tables, we'd definitely recommend if you every found yourselves in Lower East Side. Then down to the serious business of our first da...