Good morning from New York City. This morning we packed our gear and headed for a taxi as we were leaving the hotel we met a family here from Brisbane & heading to San Francisco. Amazing the conversations which can be found from the shirts I wear while travelling. Qld jersey today - everyone's favourite ;)
Is there a better feeling than being in a foreign city getting in a taxi telling him where you want to go & he leans over and locks his doors? Scary stuff I say! But it was fine. We headed to Chinatown where the bus tour was starting from and we were the first people there waiting on the street with our luggage. It was a little chilly but bearable. Hardly any traffic around when we first arrived but it picked up reasonably quickly and the police officers were out directing traffic to keep it flowing. There was a black police lady shouting at the cars it was really something to see as she blew her toot-toot whistle telling them to "get moving" and "hurry up". She was doing a great job.
Finally we boarded the bus and headed to Philadelphia. The line up to see Liberty Bell was a joke so we gave it a miss. There was a huge fire in the street nearby and we were pretty interested in that instead. When it was time to get back on the bus a whole lot of people were missing so we had to wait for the jackass's. This caused us to be delayed and limited our time for the aviation and space museum in Washington which we really wanted to see. Anyways we still saw a few old space shuttles, space suits, space launch footage, launch missiles and even gained some info on spying in the 60's. It was very interesting & we very much wanted more time.
We saw the Whitehouse, National Monument & a few old Presidential memorials. Can't say I was overly interested as there was 6 other buses stopped at the same time and there was just so many people. By the last stop we were sick of stuffing around with the tour guide so we went the other way to see the the Viet Nam memorial. Wow that was really something. There was a statue ground of soldiers fully kitted.
I think my highlight for today was the cherry blossom trees in full bloom. They were stunning. I wish I could have got some better photos but they were just like I have seen on the calendars. Just amazing.
Micks favourite for day 1 was the space museum. It was very interesting and there so many shuttles to see.
We drove on to Hagerstown after Washington & arrived at 9.30pm without having had dinner. So after being cranky that we were running behind, people were everywhere we were also unfed and starting to wonder what the hell the next 2 days will have in store! Maybe we should have caught the train.
We were offered the food of the nearby supermarket which was across the highway & not sure what to buy there as we are in a hotel room so can't really cook.... We walked for 45 minutes before finding the very last shop open luckily for us they close at 10.30pm. It was Chinese. Thankfully the food was really good. I'm not sure what the others had for dinner but we can't see them walking as far as we did.