We arrived in New York on Sunday afternoon and checked into the hotel near Newark Airport as Newark is the entry port to which our truck is being shipped.

On Monday we had a trip into Manhattan and took the train from the airport which was $15 dollars each, each way, obviously aimed at tourists with those prices. We toured Little Italy, Chinatown and Greenwich Village walking all the way. In Greenwich Village we came across a tiny, tiny little cake shop that was packed out with tourists who were queuing to get in. We couldn't understand why found out later that it was The Magnolia Bakery (?) that appears in Sex in the City.

We also rang our shipping agents to get things in motion for us to collect the truck which docks tomorrow. On Tuesday we stayed in the hotel in the morning and the agent faxed us lots of paperwork to complete to get the truck through Customs & Immigration and later we took the hotel free bus back to the airport to get a bus out to the shopping mall.

After further conversations with our agent we went out once again on the hotel bus back to the airport, on the airport train and then a local bus to Newark Penn Station and then the train to Penn Station, Manhattan. A sum total of about $9 dollars return, a lot cheaper than the $60 dollars the other day. We went out to New Jersey which is directly across the Hudson River from where the Twin Towers used to stand. There was a huge memorial dedicated to those who were killed and it must have been a truly awful site for the office workers in New Jersey City as they had virtually an eye level view with where the planes hit the Towers.

Later that evening we had to go out to a cargo distribution centre at the airport to meet a guy from the shipping agents and pay our fees for the work involved. It must have been about a mile from our hotel and the taxi charged us $25 dollars each way...and tourists complain about being ripped off in London!!

The next morning we presented ourselves at the docks as instructed at 9 a.m. imagining we could be there for hours waiting for the truck but we were out on the road by 9.30 setting off on our travels.