Brisbane to Barcelona: New York, New York

Tuesday 26 July - Monday 1 August 2011

Our flight from Cancun left at 7am. We had a 2 hour stopover in Houston, where we went through immigration and customs (which was surprisingly easy - they had a fast track line for people with no checked luggage, although the immigration officer was amazed that we didn't have any) and got our first body scan and patdown. They got a little freaked out by the zips in Lawrie's zip-off travel pants, which was funny. We arrived in New York just before 4pm but it took us two hours to get from the airport to our hotel because of the traffic and the tour we took of Manhattan dropping other people off. We had a great Indian dinner (the first in 5 months!) and had an easy night. We had a great hotel room, only 2 blocks from the Empire State Building, with polished wood floors, fireplace and a kitchen, bathroom and dining table shared with one other room.

The shopping spree began on Wednesday. We walked to the West Side via Times Square, where we found a huge Billabong store and Lawrie finally got the boardies he was looking for (they look like normal shorts but made from boardie material). We got to Metro Bikes on the West Side and found our bikes for our Europe trip - two Trek Allants. The manager let us take them on a big test ride so we rode along the Hudson River bike path and made sure that they were the ones. We were really happy with them so we paid our money and left them to be boxed so we could get them on the plane. We walked back to our hotel via some shoe stores where we bought some Vibram 5fingers and Lawrie got a pair of replacement prescription sunglasses.

Times Square

Billboard at Times Square

We passed the Intrepid on our test ride

The Hudson River

On Thursday we caught the train up to Yonkers and the REI camping store there. We spent around 6 hours stocking up on all the stuff we need but when we needed to pay, we had run out of money on our credit card, so we had to return the next day to pay - embarrassing! When we got back into NYC on Friday afternoon, we walked down to the World Trade Center site and just generally soaked up the New York atmosphere.

On Saturday we caught the subway out to Coney Island, where we went on a rollercoaster from the 1920s, which was really, really scary (not because it was unsafe, just because it was really fast, peaking at 100km/h). Lawrie got to eat a couple of famous Nathans hotdogs and we spent some time on other rides including a swinging carriage ferris wheel (1918!) which was freaky the first trip around!

We stopped in at the freak show, a Coney Island tradition before finishing up our ride tokens with another ride on the cyclone (rollercoaster) this time at the rear which was SO much rougher. Kitty's newly healed aches came back after this ride. Our camera gave up the ghost during the day, luckily our newly purchased Panasonic tough (waterproof to 12m) was ready to go.

Sunday was a lazy day catching up on washing and internet, it bucketed down raining in the evening so we got to try out our new rain jackets. We went back upstairs put on the jackets and thongs before heading back down to the lobby and outside. It was funny walking past people huddled under awnings!

On Monday we went to picked up our bikes and hauled 40kg of boxed bikes on the subway and back to the hotel. It was really tough and it made us worry about the trip to the airport the next day (more on that later). We spent the rest of the day playing with our new cycling and camping toys!

On our last day we finally went up to the top of the Empire State Building and the views from the top were incredible. We then caught the subway up to Central Park but accidentally got off at the wrong station and ended up walking through a housing project area. A little bit scary as everyone was looking at us strangely. But we made it back to Fifth Avenue and spent a nice couple of hours before heading back to the hotel to pick up our stuff and head to the subway to get to the airport. We managed to borrow a luggage trolley (with wonky wheels) from the hotel to get the bikes to Penn Station, but then Lawrie had to race back to return the trolley and pick up the last of the bags. In 35°C weather and under time constraints, it all made for a tiring and stressful trip. We made it onto the subway and finally to Terminal 7, where we checked in but had to argue about our baggage allowance (every other flight but this one allowed 2 bags each) and Lawrie got body scanned for a second time (he obviously looks much dodgier than Kitty!). We had some dinner and got on the plane to the UK.