Post New York

I've been back from New York for a week now, and still haven't posted any pics. It's been a long week.

It was a great trip - didn't get to do too much during the week, since I was there for work, but the weekend was awesome. I went out to Coney Island, which is somewhere I've read a lot about (okay, read some stories set in) but never thought I'd get to see. Sure, it's past its heyday, and it's all a bit old and faded, but that's the charm of Coney Island. It's just what I pictured (but smaller):




I saw a lot of places in New York, although I didn't go to a lot of places - I did the touristy sightseeing bus tours, so like I saw Central Park, but didn't actually go to Central Park, if that makes sense. But I did go to FAO Schwartz on 5th Avenue, and saw their life size baby elephant plush toy; I went to the huge Toys R Us on Broadway, and saw their giant indoor Ferris Wheel and, even more awesome, their giant animatronic T-Rex (I have a video of it, but I'm not quite sure how to post it here. I'll look into it). I had cheesecake at Junior's, saw the Empire State Building lit up red, white and blue for Fleet Week (and saw the fleet sail in, and the fly-bys!). I saw the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Governer's Island. I went out to Staten Island on the ferry, and saw South Street Seaport. I took the ferry to and from work (which was across the Hudson in Jersey City). I got caught in a thunderstorm, and bought touristy souveniers (including a NYPD t-shirt, NYPD sweat pants, and even NYPD socks). I tried to take a helicopter trip, but every time I booked it the day turned out too hazy to see anything. Basically I just had an awesome time :-) Oh, except that I didn't get to see Winnie the Pooh :-( I mailed the library to ask if they were open on Memorial Day, and they said they weren't - they neglected to mention that they weren't open the entire Memorial Day weekend. So the wandering around trying to find them was a bit of a waste of time.

Here are a couple of the best photos (I took hundreds, literally, and typically now I don't remember what half of them are of. That's the problem with the sightseeing tours - the guide says "there's the house where .... lives", or "that's where they filmed...."; you take a photo; you look at the photos later, going "why do I have a hundred photos of buildings?").

(I'm using Yahoo! Photos for photo storage, btw - it seemed pretty cool, but I can't figure out how to get a link to just a photo, rather than the album, so I'm still using Flickr for that. If you want to see all my photos, you can view the hi-res or low-res albums.

But now, I'm off to the Bon Jovi concert (with Nickelback!) at Milton Keynes. Pity it's not at Wembley (apart from the fact that it would be cooler, it would be so much easier to get home from afterwards), but I'm so excited, I'm sure it'll be great fun anyway! :D

Update: The concert was great! Sure, it took longer to get there and back than we actually spent at the concert, but it was awesome. Sitting around in the sun on the grass talking to friends was great; Nickelback were great (they played my 2 favourite songs of theirs, 'Savin' me' and 'How you remind me', and I heard some new great ones too, like 'Far Away'); Bon Jovi was just totally awesome. They played a lot from the new album, which I haven't heard yet, but they alternated one new and one old song, and they played all the classics - Keep the Faith (my new theme song), Living on a Prayer, and others that I can't remember right now but were really good. I'm so tired now, though - it was like a two hour aerobic class, jumping around and clapping and I had a really, really good time :-) If I can get my Vario to connect to my PC, I'll upload the two photos I took.