Our last day in New York
By traveltripz on Jul 17, 2007 in New York
This morning we slept in as long as possible and then headed down to the breakfast area as we had free vouchers with our accommodation. We both ordered eggs benedict which came with tea and orange juice and we also ordered a fruit smoothie as well at $8 each!! Still it was worth it.
I have to say that the fruit was really tasty everywhere we went and the fruit smoothies are so full of flavor and it’s the one thing that the Americans don’t seem to add extra sweetness to.
I found the sweet taste of things a bit cloying after a while. Not being overly fond of sweet tasting everything I was hanging out for something savoury in the end. Paula, doesn’t mind the sweet taste in fact she eats just about anything and never puts on any weight. I think I put the weight on just watching her munch through sweet pastries and tarts.
After breakfast we headed back to Times Square. We had brought relatively small suitcases with us as we were trying to travel light enough to take our cases on board so we wouldn’t have to wait for our luggage when we arrived. This didn’t work out quite how we had planned as we ended up letting the bags go in cargo hold after all. So the small cases were filled to overflowing and I had discared shoes, jeans and a top in Disney World as I couldn’t fit them into my bag.
This meant we needed another suitcase to put in all of the extra stuff we had purchased along the way. We found a small little overnight bag in a souvenir shop for $30 and after buying the obligatory souvenir t-shirts with New York emblazoned over them we headed back to the hotel to pack.
With the new suitcase we had a better experience packing than the day before. Everything managed to fit in nicely and before long it was time for us to leave.
The hotel had been kind enough to let us stay an extra two hours before checking out at 2pm we headed out dragging all three suitcases between us, down to Lexington and 42nd st to catch the shuttle bus to JFK. What a great service, the buses run regularly and it only costs $15 per person.
After making it to the airport early we waited in the queue for about 50 minutes for the Qantas staff to arrive to start the check-in for our flight. Lots of grumpy, grumbling going on around us as people fidgeted and couldn’t go anywhere in case they lost their spot in the queue. Really poor service on the part of Qantas.
At long last we were on our flight and heading back to Australia.
The trip home was a lot better than the trip over. We had the usual stop in LA where we were actually allowed to take a break in the airport and so we sat down at Starbucks to have a cup of tea. Once we got on the plane again we had a meal and then everyone settled down to sleep. We seemed to sleep for most of it which made things a lot easier and we arrived back in Sydney feeling quite good.
We still had to take another plane to get us back to Canberra and because customs was a disorganised mad-house we missed our connecting flight - in fact it seems most people missed their flights as we had to join a long queue of people whingeing about how badly organised everything was.
Finally we were on our plane and heading home all the time wishing we were still back in the States. It’s not that we don’t like being home, it’s just that we love the experiences that travelling gives.
