Day 2 started with another trip to Pick a Bagel (including a strawberry cream cheese bagel for Laura – she wasn’t impressed!) before we headed to catch the subway downtown during rush hour, which was an error! Had to let three trains go past because we just couldn’t get on them, then we worked out that you have to stand right at the very edge of the platform like the New Yorkers do, so that when the train arrives, you’ve almost got your face pressed up against the glass and you’ve got a chance of getting on!

Our plan for today was to do the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island cruise and Balet had told us that it would probably take a full day. When we arrived at Battery Park, we were told to walk down the queue to where the blue flags were. We kept walking – and walking –and walking, towards the end of the biggest queue I’ve ever seen, it would have taken hours just to join the main part of the queue going through the barriers. So we decided on a change of plan – we would visit Ground Zero as it was nearby and we couldn’t cope with much more walking due to the state of our feet!

The actual site where the Twin Towers stood is still a huge building site, with lots of cranes, diggers and noise, although they are making progress – the new One World Trade Centre is due to be completed in 2013. In the meantime, they’ve opened a small memorial museum next to the site, which was excellent. We were first shown a film about how and why the World Trade Centre was built, before walking through a range of displays describing the events of September 11th and they had lots of items that had been recovered from the site after the towers collapsed. Lots of these were personal items including people’s crushed glasses, shoes, phones and a receipt from someone who had just bought their breakfast in the tower minutes before the first plane hit. Also in this section were lots of the ‘Missing’ posters put up by relatives in the days following the attacks. The final part of the display was a small room where the walls were covered in photos of all of the victims of that day – so many young, happy faces – and we were told that the average age of the victims was only 37.

We followed this with a tour of the site led by two women named Anne and Arlene, who were both caught up in the events. As well as explaining what happened and how the site is being rebuilt, they really opened all of our eyes as to how many people’s lives were affected by what happened. The tour ended with Arlene’s story – her husband was a firefighter who went into the North Tower to rescue office workers and he didn’t survive. She showed us pictures of her husband with their kids and it really moved us all. However, she ended positively by saying that her husband died doing a job he loved and she went on to finish building the house that they had started together. The whole experience is definitely one I’ll remember, probably much more than if we had waited in the queue to go to Liberty Island!

In the afternoon, we headed for the other cruise that we were allowed to do on our ticket, the Circle Line Cruise, hoping for better luck with the queue. We stopped off for our first visit to McDonalds – two frozen strawberry lemonades, which helped Laura’s sore throat. At the pier, we got tickets for the 3:30 cruise, so we had time for a pretzel and fries first. The cruise and tour around Manhattan was excellent thanks to its highly informative guide – a man in his 70s dressed all in white, including white Converse trainers! We could tell he’s done this every day for years , he could recite his script in his sleep and his voice sounded like an the voiceover from an advert or a film trailer! He also had an interesting account of 9/11 – he was about to start work on the boat before the attacks and ended up ferrying people from Manhattan over to New Jersey, making 10 trips back and forth that day.

After the tour, we took a cab back to the apartment – no more walking! When we got back to the apartment block, we met another doorman who referred to Balet as 007 – he’s obviously well-known here! Our night out was going to include a trip to Justin Timberlake’s bar, Southern Hospitality, which is just around the corner but it was packed out when we got there so we headed to the Stumble Inn instead. The bar was filled with students who’ve just finished college for the summer and we both got asked for ID on the way in! We ate stuffed burgers and I had mine with tater tots, which turned out to be mini hash brown type things filled with potato – tasty! The dizzy heights of the Empire State Building must have caught up with Laura at this point as she had a sudden nosebleed out of nowhere while sitting at the table! 3 pints later, we headed back to the apartment after another busy day. Forget to mention the person we were walking behind on the way to the bar – we spotted a girl wearing red stilettos, with long dark hair, walking a small dog. Quite normal, you might say? Well, she was until she turned her head slightly and we saw ‘her’ beard!! Nothing surprises us in this town after the two days we’ve had so far…

Dave :-)