New York; Saturday, 15 April, 2017

I was up again at 7am so I headed over to the diner to grab breakfast and then headed down to the harbour area to pick up the river cruise that was included in the bus ticket.

I’d headed down early as I though the crowds might be quite big later in the day, but it turned out that everyone else had had the same idea, so despite being at the slipway nearly 30 minutes before the departure time I was still at the back of a very long queue. So long in fact that there were still about a dozen people ahead of me when they stopped boarding for the first cruise of the morning and set off. Unfortunately, there was only one boat in this operation so I had to wait in line for another 90 minutes before the boat returned, but at least it meant I was able to get a very good seat when we did start boarding.

The boat took in the East and Hudson rivers before heading out past Liberty Island where I could get a lot of good pictures of the Statue of Liberty before we headed back to the slip way to disembark. The queue of people waiting was significantly longer than it had been when I’d been in it so I was quite glad I had continued to wait as I suspect some of the people towards the back may have had waits of over 4 hours to board.

I walked round to Battery Park and picked up the next tour bus to head round the city and back over to City Hall where I got off and headed over to the Brooklyn Bridge to go for a wander across it.

Once again, I appeared to have had the same idea as every other tourist in the city as the walkway was heaving for the first part of the walk. However, once past the first tower it looked like most people were turning back so the walk between the two towers and down into Brooklyn was much quieter and I was able to get better views of the river, Manhattan and the impressive bridge itself.

Whilst the bridge itself isn’t that long the slipways onto and off of it are very long, and on the Brooklyn side added a good half mile or so more onto the walk, so that by the time I finally made it to a Subway station I was knackered.

I decided to catch the Subway back to the hotel for a bit of a rest and a freshen up before heading back out to grab some dinner and then turning in early for a good night’s rest.