Day 6 - Stop Spreading the News...

We’re both really tuckered this morning. I’ve been awake since 05:00, and Vicki’s had quite a restless night. Check-out is noon, so we decide to take our time getting packed up and checked out before heading downtown for a few hours ahead of our cab to the airport. We have amazing sandwiches at a diner in the financial district for lunch, then head to the 9/11 Memorial. It stops us in our tracks. You can’t get away from 9/11 in New York - if for no other reason than pretty much wherever you are in the city you’ll see 1 World Trade Centre/The Freedom Tower right at the South end of Manhattan. More than that though, there’s a sobriety about 9/11 that pervades - a quiet recollection that demands respect. When we visited New York in 2009, Ground Zero was a wasteland, fenced off from public view. Now, there are amazing and yet heartbreaking monuments to the towers, the thousands of people that died in their destruction. The footprint of each tower has been replaced with a water feature, and a bronze cast around the outside is engraved with the name of every single person that died in the terrorist attacks. Actually - not every single person - for understandable reasons, the Memorial doesn’t provide remembrance for the terrorists involved in perpetrating the attacks. It’s a staggering monument to the evil of humankind. We both well up.

Our jauntiness balloon is somewhat deflated, so we take a walk through the financial district, and pitch up at a brilliant bar called the Dead Rabbit, which has one of the biggest collections of whisky that I've seen. Some wine/Guinness and a brilliant American Malt Whisky later, and we’re feeling a little recovered. It’s a quick subway ride back to our Ace Hotel to grab our bags, and we wile away an hour (Happy, happily..) in the Lobby Bar waiting for our cab to speed us to the airport.

‘Speed us’ was apparently a misnomer of the worst kind. The drive between JFK and Midtown can be done in as few as 25 minutes. On Saturday evening when we arrived into JFK, it was shade under an hour. On a Thursday afternoon, the trip to JFK takes 1h30m. Just nose to tail most of the way. The slow crawl gives me some time to reflect on New York…

I love it. It remains one of my very favourite cities on the planet. SO much to do, SO much to see, SO many great places to eat and hang out.
It is wildly expensive for a British traveller. Hotel accommodation in Manhattan is off-the-chain pricey. Eating and drinking out are painful at times. Happy Hours are out there, but not the opportunity for bargain boozing that we’ve seen in Nevada and California in recent years.
We still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface, but we’ve definitely got more under the skin of this behemoth of a city. We spent more time in neighbourhood dive bars, the boozy life-blood of the city. We ate in more neighbourhood diners, we experienced rather than saw the city.
We’ll be back for sure - and I suspect in far fewer than the 14 years since our last visit.

JFK is, well, JFK. Queues abound, and the TSA teams are their usual cheery selves. We grow a little frustrated at our slow progress, but honestly, leaving the US typically feels like this. We park up in a wine bar for some last minute Chardonnay. Our flight is a little delayed leaving, but after a quick feed, we’re both asleep pretty quickly.Read more