New York Day 1

The Drive from Lancaster to New York was an interesting one. Mainly because we celebrated a bit our sailing reunion with Bret and few of his friends.  Was a good night but the morning after is always a bit interesting.

Anyways, I managed to build up some anticipation on how the drive would go - especially in Manhattan, since in order to get to where I was going (I'll get to that in a moment) I had to drive through the whole city! And before this trip I actually haven't really driven that much. I never owned a car and whenever I'm in Finland I only borrow my mom's car for mainly short trips. So before getting to NY I got a good amount of anxiety about it. Especially when everybody was warning me about it in forehand.. BUT.. once in NYC I had no problem of whatsoever! Very smooth driving just through the city! But "checking another box": Driven in NYC! 

Also Arriving to NYC meant that the first part of my travel was done. The east coast drive was done after about 1800 mile (apx 3000km). It was really interesting to see the change of scenery as you got northern and northern. And also the fact that I was able to see the change of season as the palm trees from FL changed into the colors of fall yellow, red & orange.

I arrived to Brooklyn during afternoon to my friends place. Which I'm still super grateful, for they actually left me a key to their apartment while they went to prepare their Wedding Reception!! (which I attended 3 days after) So now I had their place for myself and a city to explore. I was actually pretty tired from the party previous night and the drive, but you cannot use one's time in NYC by resting!

Empire State Building

So on the first day and night I went sightseeing and checked out the sights I was able to check out while it was dark. First I walked around the city, just to get a feeling of it. And then walked to check out the Empire State Building - no King Kong, but damn it's big! From there I walked to see the Madison Square Garden and finally to see the lights of the Times Square. And they were bright. So many people and what surprised me a bit was all kind of characters who were there to attract tourists (like me) to take photos. On my part I decided not to fall into these tourist traps where you take the photo and then get hustled by the guy to give money! - So 5 photos and $10 later... :)

I also wanted to check a show but at that time there was no shows that I could've just walked on in that I found - other than a comedy show to which they were selling tickets in the streets. And as I wanted to check one I went to this one.. It was the smallest and dodgyest comedy show I've ever seen.. with 8 of us in the audience!  But the guys did a good job and got few heckles from it. So night well spent!

Got back to Brooklyn around 1am and crashed to bed!

I was expecting NYC to be colder at this time of year though. But it was nice and warm "t-shirt weather"! The walking speed of people on the other hand was as fast as I expected.