Day Ten of Our Historic East Coast Tour

Wed Sept 24: Down Town NY WOW what a eye opener. We were in the down town NY area for 12 hours. The poor bus driver driving in that qrid lock for 8 hoursw deserves a reward. We had a guide ride with us and tell the history.
The majority of people don't have cars. NY has 5 transportation methods to move people, subway, light rail, bus, taxi and ferry. Plus there is no parking and no vacant spaces to develop a parking lot. We saw one lot that stacks the cars on wire racks like you see going down the road. The city controls how many taxi's and they have approved 13,000. If a person wants to become a taxi driver he has to pay for a license and they cost up to $480K. There are still 2 million cars in NY.
NY is split in three parts down town, mid town, uptown. Manhattin is the smallest it is 12miles long and 2 miles wide (in the widest part). Central Park is located in this area. We got off the bus and walked through central park which was a 4 block walk. We walked through the Strawberry Field area which is accross from John Lennon's home. The city bought 843 acres in 1852 and build this beutiful park. It is all man made because before it was swamp, old homes, and nothing much there. There is 300 parks in NY peoples homes have no yard so you have to take the kids and pets to a park. Homes are alot like in Boston all side by side. Our guide said NY kids don't know what animals are so they have a big children zoo so they can learn what a cow, pig, and etc is. The China town in NY is one of the largest in the US.

1.2 million kids that go to public schools, there is 68,000 teachers and 2 million dogs. A lot of the children in NY go to private schools

We stopped down town at Grenach Village at a bakery that had pastry to die for. We had coffee and a Kinolli it was similar to a sugar cone but filled with a sweet cream cheese filling that looked like a hot dog bun with pom poms on the ends which was the filling. Very good. I know what we will be doing when we get to AZ it is called dieting. haha.


The M&M factory is down town so Barb took this picture for Teresa.
This billboard on the factory building does like a slide show of different pictures.

This a picture of all the taxi's and mass people. We went to the broadway show "Jersey Boys" so we had two hours to get something to eat and meet our Wagonmasters at the Theatre. There was so many cars and People and this was a week night. But we found out there was 40 broadway shows so that makes sense why so many people was there.

This building is the court house and where they film Law & Order and CSI and those kind of shoes.

This picture is a statue of Angels in time. This is in Central Park. This was about half way through our 4 block walk.

This is carriage rides that also go through the Central Park.
This is a memorial area for John Lennon that is located in the Central Park.

5th avenue was the end of our walk. Also 5th avenue is where the weathy live and upper class individuals. There is signs in this area that say "DO NOT HONK YOUR HORN IN THIS AREA" You can be fined if you do. Also signs that say "DONT EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE". I guess these people who live in this area don't like to be disturbed.

We now are at ground zero. This building is the work financial center and from this building we observed Ground Zero. When you see all these big buildings side by side you can't imagine that
it did not destroy everything around them.

Picture of the construction going on at ground zero. They have rebuilt one of the buildings and it is over half done.
The bluish building behind these cranes is the rebuilt building.


At 5:30 the tour guide had finished her part and we were dropped off a block from the Theatre where we were to see THE JERSEY BOYS. We were very exhausted when we got back to our RV's at 11:00 pm. But it was a great experience to see and here about the history of NY. We were told it is very clean and up scale today but back in the 80's it was a very run down city.