Trip to NewYork in Oct, 2000

I am back once again to share my travel experiences with you. This time it is about the trip that i made to the prestigious city of Newyork.This time the crowd was only 6 and that too we finalized about the mode of transport and the exact number only on friday(Oct 6th, 2000). We had to juggle around our options to get our van booked.

But our work made us postpone our start to Sat morning. It was raining heavily also on Friday night. So we started off in a Ford Windstar on 7th morning on a bright sat
morning.

The journey was as usual cool and interesting. It was nice to go thru the great US highways once again. We had our food after 2 hours of drive and continued to drive. As we had to go to Newjersey for our stay, we had to cross Newyork. We were following the directions given by Yahoo maps, but to out utter dismay they mislead us and we
took a wrong route towards George Washington Bridge. There was a loooong traffic jam and we got stuck up in that. We lost nearly 2 hrs in crossing the bridge and coming back once again to trace back the route that we lost.... Though we lost 2 hrs, it was real fun to travel thru that bridge, it was an excellent construction marvel indeed. We had to pay $7.00 to travel on the bridge, but it was a great experience..

Atlast after losing some more time on the traffic atlast we reached our destination, a place called Orange (doesn’t that sound crazy !!). We got settled up and decided not to go out anywhere after having dinner (as usual !!!). The next day we started off late, thanks to the delay caused by some of our tour mates.. We started the journey by train from a station called Newark. It was real fun to travel in that train. Everything was automatic and that too for a person like me who had been travelling in train right from my childhood days it was great to travel in a fully automatic train. After some time the train went into a tunnel under the river. Then it never came up !!.
Atlast, we got down at World Trade Center(WTC) station and then came up into the road.

Gradually we went near the twin towers of the great WTC.. Wow, what a structure it was. 2 towers, each consisting of 108 floors.. It was spectacular. We decided to go up on the tower later and proceeded on towards the Newyork stock exchange. After walking for some time, we were on the famous Wall Street. The stock exchange was closed as it was a sunday. We took snaps from outside of the building and then once again went into the subway to catch the next train. It was interesting to note that the subway train has been there for a long number of years and even ticketing is automatic.. Sounds great yaar...

Then we proceeded on towards catching the ferry to Staten Island. The ferry took us away from the city and we were able to see the beautiful city of Newyork loaded with all sky scrapers. That was awesome.. We started tooking photos madly. We were just not able to resist ourselves from catching the superb views we got from the ferry. The breeze was ice cold, but the journey was good. We returned back in the same ferry due to lack of time. After coming back we went to catch the ferry to the World's wonder Liberty Statue. This time we had to pay 7 bucks to go to the statue. It was the last ferry for the day and we were able to grab a place for ourselves in the ferry. The breeze became all the more colder, but that was also interesting.. We landed up on the island and joined the queue to go onto the pedestal of the statue. I was just taken away by the astonishing height of the statue. It was amazing... The Queue was so long which took me back to the memory about the Tirupathi "Q", in which i had stood for hours together for many years.

Slowly and steadily we got near to the elevator and zoom..... we went up till a point and were made to climb up to the pedestal. We were unlucky that the entry to the crown of the the statue was closed. It was a nice view from the pedestal, but were not able to take photographs from that point. We were able to see many Desis(all India S/W profs) trying to take photographs.. We cant change them !!!!!

Gradually as the sun went down we started our journey back towards the other shore. We were able to see the beauty of the Liberty statue during the sunset. I am sure that this scenic beauty will remain in our hearts for a long time to come. Once we were our out on the other shore, we catched yet another subway train and reached the famous Times Square. Wow !!! that was I said as i went into the street from the subway.. It was fully loaded with jazzy lights and hoardings. Only then i felt that i am in Newyork. We also saw the NBC studios that was on the main street. I just have to say that we were taken away by the way the whole area was lightened up.. After walking up for some distance we were also able to see The Empire State Building (of JEANS fame) lightened up in 3 different colours.

With all these pleasant memories, we went into a huge railway terminal called the Grand Central Terminal to go to one of our friend's place. I was not able to believe that it was a railway station. It was like a 5-star hotel full of sculptures and breath-taking paintings on the large dome of the station. It was not only large, but beautiful and neatly organized. Later we got the information that its an historic place. I was able to compare this with the famous VT station in Mumbai (not in size but atleast in their historical background). We purchase the tickets and entered the train(we were still in the subway !!). After sometime the journey started and atlast we felt happy to see the train come out of the subway. I sat beside the famous window seat(for which i have had many fights in my childhood days..) and was able to scenic beauty of NY during night. Once we (me and one of my colleagues) reached the destination, we were greeted by the freezing air..

We met our friend and reached his place, a suburb near Dobb's ferry(the rly station where we got down). The person is a Professor in the Cardiology Dept of Columbia University. I had an intellectual talk about the American and Indian educational system (as usual !!!!) with him after having a fantastic Indian Dinner. We started off on our journey once again the 3rd day of the trip(9th Oct), once again by train. That morning we had good old Indian Masala dosas and Idlis neatly prepared by my colleagues cousin sister. Once again the same train journey, but this time it was by an express train, so we reached the Grand Central terminal pretty fast.

Once we landed up there, we proceeded towards the Empire State Building. We bought the tickets and stood near the elevator in the long Q... We entered the elevator once we got our turn and the elevator started off. It was going up the floors one by one till the 10th one, then it started zooming off 20, 30, 40... till the 80th one. Then we went till the 86th floor by another elevator. We came out onto the open balcony.. Wow... that was yet another breath taking sight to be on top of the such a huge building's 86th floor. The cold breeze was literally dashing against us, but we dared to bear the cold and took snaps of the city's various vantage points from such a height. As we saw the roads, it was like seeing toy cars standing in a game.. We came down the elevator once again and went towards the 3-D virtual reality show. This show was simply superb !!. I just dont have words to explain that experience. We were made to sit in a hall and seat belts were put up as if it was like a space craft. The film shown to us took us onto various parts of NY and Manhattan. The 10 mins show was terrifying experience. I would advise anyone who is going to go to NY should never miss this show.

Once we were out of this show, we took another train towards the WTC. We were once again in front of the twin towers. There was yet another long "Tirupathi" Q at WTC also. The ticket was bit costly here. But anyhow we bought it and stood in front of the elevator. After nearly 15 mins we got into the same and it went up slow and steadily. It took 65 seconds to reach the 107th floor !!!!.. We came out of the elevator onto the closed lobby and had a awesome look of NY from the tallest building in Newyork. Once again, it was photos and toy cars. .... But we spent more time here as we were able to see the Hudson river, the bridges and of course the Atlantic sea from a long distance. We came down the elevator once again and started off ina train towards the Oranges to join our other tour mates..

Atlast we started off our journey back to Boston by 4.30 pm and reached safely by 10 pm. To end with, me and my colleague Saravanan (incidentally he is also my college junior), we both had immense fun as were speaking only American english during the trip. The most used phrase was "Its cool man... " and one more was "we got it ... "
and of course the famous Yup.... So we are there !!!!!

It was a fantastic trip once again. Thanks once again for going thru the mail.. bye

Vijay