Day 10 - New York - Liberty Island
After a good nights rest, we were all ready and excited to visit NY. Our hotel was at Hasbrouck Heights, which was about 10 miles from the city. The best way to get there was by bus.
We had to walk 10 minutes to the bus stop. The name of the bus stop was Boulevard and Madison. Essentially they had named the bus stops by the names of the intersecting streets.
We took the bus 163 to Port Authority, which was their NY bus stand. The tickets were $4.50 each. Deepika took a return ticket which cost us $9 per person. Kids were not charged. We had to pay in cash to the bus driver as card payment was not accepted on the bus.
The bus journey was very comfortable and the buses were going fast as well unlike the London buses.
It took us about 45 minutes to reach Port Authority. From there we had to buy tickets for the subway.
It was called a railcard and it cost $1 for the card and you could top up on the card and use it for travel. After a lot of trying we managed to load the card with $19 each as the ticket machine would not load $9 and would not take card.
We decided to take only 2 railcards. For the other 2 we just thought of using our debit card to swipe in. And the best part was the debit cards worked. So we had gone through all that ordeal for nothing, when we could have just used our debit cards all along.
The train fare was $2.75 per ride. There was no swipe out option at the destination station so, I assume these are all fixed fare rides.
We got off at South Ferry station. That was the stop where we would take the ferry to Liberty Island and Ellis Island.
We booked the ferry tickets from the official website. The cost was $24 for adults and $12 dollars for kids. We did not get the tickets for the pedestal as they were all fully booked and the crown tickets were not available until June/July.
We went through the security and boarded the ferry. The ferry ride was about 20 minutes to Liberty Island. We toured the place and took a lot of pictures.
The girls really loved the Statue of Liberty. They ran around and enjoyed themselves a lot. After spending a couple of hours there, we decided to make a move.
We got on the ferry, which left every 30 mins from the island. We did not get off at Ellis Island. We went directly back to NY.
We took the subway Yellow Line to City Hall. We walked about the place and found a McDonalds to freshen up.
It was odd that no shops has toilets for customers. Only McDonalds had toilets for customers. So we visited it a lot today. 😅
We stopped at a local pub to have some wings and beer. The kids enjoyed the much needed break and after that we went walking around the Financial district. We visited Wall Street and saw the NYSE.
We spent a lot of time over there taking a lot of pictures. The day was very warm and we kept ourselves hydrated.
Finally we took the metro to Port Authority, which was near Times Square and took our bus 163 back to our hotel. It had been a wonderful and exciting day!
