The Big Apple
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2005
1
2
65
Trip End
May 11, 2006
New York,
New York,
United States
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
We caught the train from Montreal on Sunday morning. I now understand why the train takes so long (even longer than the bus), it only travels at about 30 mph the whole way and stops at a lot of places along the way.
We made the mistake of booking the train before finding somewhere to stay. When we started phoning around the hostels we found that all of them were full, even the biggest one with 624 rooms had no space for us to stay. We had our tickets booked so we had no choice but to go, even though we had nowhere to stay. We knew we had one hostel we could phone that said they'd put us up even though they had no free beds
Arch in Washington Square
.After arriving around 8 o'clock we tried to phone the hostel but there was no answer. All we could do was walk down there and see if they would accept us. It was quite a few blocks walk with all our stuff and it was still pretty hot at this point. The place we arrived at didn't much look like a hostel, they had moved. Arse. We found a phone box and started phoning round places again, eventually we found a hotel that had a room free with two bed and they were willing to let one of us sleep on the floor. This was our place for the night.
The next day we had a walk around a bit of down town before getting the subway to Central park where there was a hostel that was likely to have beds. The public holiday, the reason everywhere was full, was now over so everyone was checking out and heading home. We got 3 beds in a 6 bed dorm for $10 less than what we had to pay in the hotel for 2 beds.
Yesterday we went to a West Indian carnival in Brooklyn. Today we are hopefully going to go up the Empire State building and see the Satue of Liberty.
We have a lift to Washington the day after tomorrow, all we have to do is split the cost of the gas. In Washington we're hopefully going to pick up a drive away car but we still haven't been able to get in contact with them yet, hopefully we'll be able to do this today.
I would write more but there have been two power cuts since I started writing this and I keep losing all my work.
