Autumn in New York

After spending the last couple of years travelling around Europe and the United Kingdom, we have become quite eager recently for a change of scenery.

After my sister Kylie told me she was planning on going to New York in July of this year, we completely copied her idea and planned our own trip to the Big Apple for September.

We arrived at JFK after a 7 hour flight from London, the longest flight we've taken since leaving New Zealand in 2010. We flew Virgin Atlantic, and I have to say it was a pretty good flight. The food and entertainment were both good, and we arrived in America feeling pretty good.

The only downside was the size of the queues for Customs at JFK, we ended up waiting for almost an hour before we were able to get out of the airport.

We caught the Metro to our hotel in Long Island City, not in Manhattan itself. Long Island City has recently had a big boom in hotels popping up, and while it is still mostly an industrial area, it's only two stops from Times Square on the Metro and hotel prices are much cheaper than in Manhattan.

After dropping off our bags and refreshing ourselves, we caught the Metro to the Upper East Side, where Gossip Girl is filmed and is one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in New York. We thought a stroll through the area and Central Park was a great way to ease our way into the city.

We strolled the streets for a couple of hours, enjoying seeing buildings so typically New York that we felt like we were in a movie.

We were getting pretty hungry by this time, so stopped for a late lunch at Shake Shack, an amazing burger place we'd heard about and were eager to try. We also figured a burger and fries were a good start to our American visit.

After lunch we stopped going North and started heading West towards Central Park. We came across a Dean and Deluca, an upmarket grocery store similar to Whole Foods. They sell a lot of international foods, like Vegemite and a lot of British goodies.

We took a few photos but managed to leave without buying anything. Even the amazing looking cookies!

Lots of different types of tea

Coloured sugar!

Another block over and we found ourselves on Fifth Avenue, or Museum Mile, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neither of us are particularly interested in Art, as previously noted on our Paris trip, so we took some photos of the amazing outside of the Museum, but bypassed going inside.

We ended up in Central Park in the early evening. It's hard to describe how big Central Park is, we only managed to see perhaps a third of it, but have a look at this site which shows the size of the Park in comparison to central Auckland.

We started about halfway down, and ran out of time to backtrack to see the rest as it was getting dark and the jet lag was starting to get to us.

There were lots of kids sailing their boats on The Lake in the park, one of the many lakes throughout Central Park.

The famous Alice in Wonderland statue was so crowded with people and kids climbing all over it that it made it too hard to take any photos. We walked a bit further along the path, and discovered a statue of Hans Christian Andersen and a duck. It was completely deserted, so we managed to get some photos without random kids in the background!

The view across The Pond looking towards the Plaza Hotel, made famous by Home Alone 2, one of my favourite movies!

We watched the sun setting over the buildings surrounding Central Park, before heading back towards 5th Avenue to our Metro station. Even on the way back to the Metro, we saw lots of famous buildings, like Bergdorf Goodman, FAO Schwarz and Bloomingdales. 

It really felt like we were in a movie every time we turned a corner, and that was just the first day!

We headed back to our hotel for an early night so we were rested for what was sure to be a huge day tomorrow.