5th September 2009
Well, we’ve arrived stop 1, day 1, New York.
Yesterday, after flying from Heathrow, we grabbed a yellow cab from the airport to our hotel just off Wall Street (although he couldn’t drive down Wall Street to drop us off as traffic is now not allowed in much of the financial district). 
Nice, clean and fairly quiet hotel, even though our room overlooks a row of pubs and restaurants. We had a quick meal at a Mexican restaurant and retired to bed. 
Up fairly early this morning, we walked down to the World Trade Centre site. Nothing much to see here really, just a big building site now. Then we walked down through the Hudson River Park to Battery Park to catch the ferry out to Statten Island. We took the ferry across past the Statue of Liberty with the obligatory loads of photos taken, then the return journey into Manhattan. 
Next we decided to walk the length of Broadway to Times Square calling in and making detours at various points along the way.
The first port of call was St Pauls Chapel near the World Trade Centre. On September 11th 2001, this served as a missionary for the rescue workers and also became the focus for the many leaflets and photos that families posted up on the railings outside looking for their loved ones. The chapel now features a timeline of events on that dreadful day. One particularly poignant part of the event was that each of the firefighters that were in attendance had left their ‘civvy’ shoes on the railings outside the church. Many never returned to collect them. Inside the chapel, various exhibits depict different moving chapters in the events during and after the terrorist attack. A truly moving event, topped off by a visit to the ‘Bell of Hope’ in the churchyard, a gift from London to New York one year after the attacks which is now rung on September 11th and also to commemorate the bombs in Madrid and London every year. As such a moving place, we didn’t feel it was appropriate to take photos.
After the chapel we continued to wander up Broadway, passing City Hall and then making a detour to Mulberry Street in Little Italy. This was lovely as it was a pedestrianised area full of restaurants. We picked a small Italian and enjoyed some wonderful pasta, nice to take a rest after all that walking!
We continued up Mulberry Street to Union Square where we wandered around the market, the fruit and veg looked and smelled really fresh. Next onto Madison Square Park where we sat in the shade of the park and watched the squirrels running around. It’s been in the eighties here today, so walking all that way was hot work!
We finally arrived in Times Square and it was even busier than the rest of the walk had been, in fact things seemed to get steadily more busy the higher up Manhattan Island we got. A quick trip to Macy’s proved much too busy, so we bought a cold drink from a 7/11 and sat and soaked up the (manic!) atmosphere.
All walked out, we used the subway to get back to Wall Street, even managing to change lines! Back at base just chilling before we go out to get something to eat - going to try the South Street Seaport and see what we find :)