Our Trip to America

I've just had a fantastic trip with Adam to America. It was planned on the spur of the moment when Adam discovered that Qantas was selling cheap tickets to New York for half the normal price! We booked our tickets very quickly before we missed out, as there were only a limited number of seats on offer.

Crossing the Pacific was a never-ending journey, and in fact, the whole twenty-one hour flight to New York was a squashed, back-aching ordeal, but it turned out to be worth ever minute of discomfort.

New York is brilliant! Big, bustling and busy, but also friendly, clean, efficient, inexpensive and safe. The no-tolerance attitude to crime in New York has worked wonders on the place. I didn't see a single bit of graffiti anywhere, and we could walk around happily at night without any worries. Pity the same thing can't happen here in Australia.

On the first two days in Manhattan, we used our pre-paid double-decker bus tickets, and headed Uptown, Downtown and over to Brooklyn. The tickets also included ferry rides around Manhattan Island and out to the Statue of Liberty, plus a lift ride to the top of the Empire State Building and entry into the Old Seaport Museum. At $88 a pop, it was money well-spent. By the time we had done all of this, we really felt we were getting our bearings and had a good idea about the layout of Manhattan.

Uptown is posh. It is the area that surrounds the wonderful Central Park. The apartments and shops are for the very rich, but the park is for everyone. We hired bikes one day and rode all around Central Park, which is huge. It covers seven hundred acres and takes up about a fifth of the total area of Manhattan. North of Uptown is Harlem which goes to the very northerly tip of Manhattan Island.

Downtown is located in the more southerly section of the island and is older and more historic. This is where the original New York City began, with some beautifully decorated, older-style architecture. It is also where the financial hub of America lies, with Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange as the highlights. Ground Zero is also there, where a 1,700 foot phoenix is soon to arise from the ashes. Districts like Greenwich Village and Chinatown are part of the Downtown area too.

Our hotel was in Midtown, close to Herald Square on West 32nd Street. I always thought that these directional street names sounded boring, but in a big city like New York, it is the most sensible way to name the streets. The avenues in Manhattan go from one end of the island to the other. There are about ten avenues with Fifth Avenue running along the middle of the city. Then there are the cross-streets - about one hundred and seventy of them - running across the avenues from the south of Manhattan to north. 1st St. is at the bottom of Downtown and 170th St. is way up at the top of Harlem. Any location west of Fifth Avenue is named West, and places to the east are labelled East. Therefore, our hotel at 17 West 32nd St. was 32 streets up and to the west of Fifth Avenue by 17 buildings. An address in Manhattan is a grid reference to its location. Very handy.

The highlights of our time in New York were:

• Our fifteen minute helicopter flight over Manhattan and down the Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty.
• Our ride on a fast speedboat, again down the Hudson, past Ellis Island and out to the Statue of Liberty.
• Our bike ride through Central Park.
• Our visit to the American Museum of Natural History and the Planetarium.
• Our wander around the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see such great artworks as those of Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Van Gogh, Monet, Rousseau, Manet, Turner, Gauguin, Lautrec, Rembrandt, Pollock, Kandinsky and Warhol.
• Our trip to the Top of the Rock (Rockefeller Centre) to see the spectacular view over Central Park in one direction and the Empire State Building in the other.
• Our walk across the wooden walkway of the famous, old Brooklyn Bridge.
• Our night-time visit to the top of the Empire State Building to see the glittering lights of the city.
• Our visit to the Guggenheim for a close-up view of the beautiful interior of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, and for a look at the collection of his architectural drawings.

We caught a bus down to see family friends, just north of Baltimore, for a few days. Although Baltimore is not much to write home about, Ruxton and Towson to the north are absolutely beautiful areas to live in. The houses are elegant and stately, the woods and gardens are green and lush, and you would never know that you were only twenty minutes from one of the most crime-riddled cities in the USA.

Staying with our friends, the Armstrongs, was a happy time and gave us a rest from the hectic pace of New York. My mum made friends with Alex Armstrong during the Second World War. She was in the Royal Australian Air Force and he was an officer in the United States Navy. They wrote to each other from about 1942 onwards, Alex marrying Louise after the war and setting up home in Ruxton, where they raised five children. Louise is now 90 and still as fit as a fiddle. Alex died a few years ago. Mum married Dad, of course, and raised us four children, and all the time, the friendship continued by mail. The Armstrongs have visited us in Australia, and Mum and Dad visited them in America. It was our turn to visit the Armstrongs again and continue the friendship, which is now a three-generation affair.

After Baltimore, we caught an Amtrak business class express train up to Boston for a couple of nights. We travelled at 240 km/hr (150 mph) and got a great view as we passed through towns and countryside over the five hour trip. Boston is a lovely, old city, founded in 1630, and full of history and old buildings. The centre of town felt quite English and I had to remind myself that I was still in America. We did a bus tour around the city and then a ferry ride on Boston Harbour, before taking another train back down to New York.

We were having such a good time on our holiday that we didn't want to come home, but after a fortnight, reality forced us to return. Adam went straight back to work and so did I, but ever since we have been home, neither of us has been able to put the trip out of our mind. It was an unforgettable holiday - absolutely unforgettable.