New York; Friday, 16 December, 2022

Inevitably I was awake just after 5am, so I dozed for about an hour before getting up and making use of my time by having a nice long shower and unpacking, before heading down to be one of the first people into breakfast when it opened at 7.

A lengthy breakfast later, and little while getting ready – hoping that the torrential rain might just turn it down a bit to heavy rain – I headed out of the hotel over towards the subway station at Times Square, stopping off to take some photos of the area in the grey murk of a very wet New York morning.

I picked up the Subway and headed Uptown to the top of the Museum Mile as, given the weather forecast was pretty bad for the whole day, I was going to spend the day indoors as much as possible. My first stop was the Museum of the City of New York which tells the history of the city, from it’s 17th century founding as a Dutch trading post through to the modern day.

I spent a couple of hours taking in the various galleries and the very interesting 30 minute film on the growth of the city, before heading out into the rain and starting my walk south through Central Park and onto my second stop of the day, the Guggenheim Museum.

The museum is housed in one of the most striking buildings in New York, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in an art-deco style with the bulbous rotunda housing the main part of the gallery. You start at the ground floor and take the sloping path up as it winds its way up to the 7th floor with the art displayed on the outer wall of the building, the central core open to look through the whole building at once.

From the Guggenheim museum I continued walking south just a couple of blocks this time to the largest museum in the Americas, and one of the largest on the planet – The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or more commonly known as The Met.

The museum is housed in a gigantic building that has clearly been expanded multiple times over the decades on the edge of Central Park, and thankfully – given that it was already 14:30 when I arrived – on a Friday and Saturday is open until 21:00 which did mean I didn’t have to rush and see just the key displays.

I spent nearly 4 hours in the museum, which was about the most that my feet could take, and I’d only really given it a cursory overview – though I had seen most of the galleries and ticked off many of the key exhibits, including the Egyptian temple sent to The Met when it was rescued from its almost certain destruction with the construction of the reservoir for the Aswan dam in Egypt, and the museums copy of Washington Crossing the Delaware – one of the most famous of the paintings in its collection.

With my feet aching from the slow plodding round galleries I headed back towards the subway and caught the train back to my hotel where I was in time to grab the included buffet dinner, before heading back up to my room to rest my feet, and pretty soon after decided that going to bed was probably the best option.