Notebook and Pen

After a couple of recovery days including a much welcomed continental breakfast, 18 inch pizzas and a lot of sleep, we were ready to start making the most of the city again and today began our 7 day pass to New York's attractions.

The New York pass is a fast track way to see all of the main tourist points of the city, plus a useful queue jump to most places to avoid wasting the week in long lines. Our first stop was the Natural History Museum, located down the side of Central Park.

As far as museums go, it was a pretty good one, but could go either way of the scale of extremes of opinion depending on personal interest. I personally wanted to see the famous dinosaur skeleton, a few other small exhibits but mostly a quick look around the main parts before moving on to get around as many things as possible. Dave on the other hand, loves this type of thing and could have spent all day reading about evolution and rock formation, which there is a lot of.

As much of a compromise as we could find and after a quick sandwich in the park we moved onto the NBC Studio tour. Playing the part of a news anchor, watching demonstrations of special effects make-up and the day to day running of a news studio, much more my sort of thing, no endless fossils here. We could even get the autographs of people we'd never heard of if we wanted to.

We'd arranged to meet Ali & Matt to visit the Top of the Rock and had a couple of hours to kill so dipped into Madame Tusaud's to meet Brad, Hugh, Leonardo and some other friends, which turned out to be one of the day's best attractions. Plus, we were successful in meeting the President finally after the last failed attempt in DC.

Although the Rockefeller Centre has the best view of the only non-lit up place in the city, Central Park, we went for this observation tower at night to get the best view of the Empire State building, which wasn't the only thing we got to see with a great view. A lightening storm had started just before we arrived at the top, and although it was fairly distant, still would have made some great photos if I'd have timed it right (everyone got bored of my attempts after photo 250 something and made me go back down so we could go for a drink instead).

Some more overpriced cider later and we'd successfully fitted as much as possible into our first sightseeing day, round two tomorrow.