80 Days in America

Monday always is a free day at the ministry, so I went with my friend Felicia to Manhattan. We planned to go with the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, but the line for the ferry was so long that we decided to skip that. Again my advice: if you want to go to the Statue of Liberty, be sure you are at the ferry before 09.00AM, because else you have to wait for probably more than an hour. Afterwards we were happy that we skipped the Statue of Liberty, because we had more time to see all the other places. We rented two bikes and crossed the city with them. Biking through Manhattan is such a good way to discover the city, it’s much faster than a yellow cab and if you go all day long it’s also cheaper. You have to be very careful though, because the traffic in New York is crazy. The nice thing is that they’re not really used to bikers here, so there aren’t really rules for bikers (at least, I think there aren’t). So we biked on the sidewalks and on the streets, just whatever worked the best for the moment.

We started on the west side of Manhattan where there is a really nice bike-path next to the water. It was a super beautiful day again, warmth of the bright sun and a cool wind, I love it! We went to the Highline park, the park above the streets and after that we had lunch in the park at Union Square, such a nice place to hang out for a bit. There is a huge bookstore at Union Square. It was nice to spend some time there too. Later in the afternoon we went to Central Park and because of the beautiful weather, there were many people hanging out in the park. We made a quick stop at the Apple Store at 5th avenue, but it was super busy there. Then we suddenly realized that we had to hurry, because we had to return the bikes at six o’ clock. As fast as we could we raced back to the south side of the island. We crossed more than 50 blocks in about 45 minutes, I think that is quite fast for New York. It must be a dream job to be a delivery boy on a bike here in Manhattan. Or maybe just to do a race on bikes to see who can cross the city the fastest. Anyway, we had a lot of fun racing back and we were just in time back at the bike rental place. Quite exhausted we sat down at a bench and enjoyed a very nice sunset. All with all it was a great day in New York! 😎