Day 1-Wednesday 17th October
Woke up at 5:40 after not sleeping particularly well. The bed seemed quite hard compared to my usual one!
I had a shower and we were dressed and down for breakfast at 6:15
The breakfast was great and it was quiet in the restaurant so we managed to eat plenty and were finished by 6:55. We walked back up to our room and finished packing up.
We watched the Wheel of Fortune with Bradley Walsh and Jenny Powell. It was very old and funny to see!
We left the room at 8:30 after our test run yesterday. Annoyingly we realised trains weren't running so often this morning so we were sat on this train until it left at 9:11
Luckily we had checked in online so we only needed to do bag drop.
Once we did get to the Virgin desk area it only took 15 minutes to get through the bag drop. The desk lady was very interested in whether we were doing 2 weeks in NYC, I explained it was only 4 days, she looked a bit confused to start with ha!
We headed straight for security which was quite entertaining. The American guy in front of us had mislaid his passport and was shouting about it, the guards were rolling their eyes a lot.
I went through the body scan and they took a swab of my shoes to check for explosives
.
By 10am we were through to Terminal 3. Arron thought we should sit so we plumped for Strada and sat at the bar, our server was Fabio and Arron just got a beer.
Our gate was announced while we were in there and I was getting restless so we left at ten to 11. We headed to WHSmith where I got a puzzle book, water and Glacier fruits and Arron got a Graze flapjack.
I started going to Gate 31, luckily we looked on the board again and saw we should be at Gate 16 instead. Yikes!
We boarded and were seated by around 11:15.
We were on Diamond Girl and took off at 12:10.
There was a good film selection and our lovely in front neighbours reclined IMMEDIATELY
. I watched Love, Simon and Arron watched Jaws.
We had all the standard food and I watched Frozen followed by travel Man in Miami.
It was a pretty uneventful flight and we were off at 3:30.
Security looked so chaotic as the queues were a mess and it was very loud! However, it was actually pretty easy to navigate and we managed to get our bags and join the cab queue before 4pm
The queue was very straightforward and all the cabs accept credit card which was super good as I didn't want to use our cash for this.
We were assigned a cab and began driving just after 4.
The journey was mega interesting for someone who has never been to New York, seeing all the neighbourhoods and school buses. The driving was fast but seemed ok around here.
And then we saw the Men in Black saucers
As we came towards the city we could see the skyline coming into view and it was very exciting.
At this point the traffic got horrific as got closer to our hotel. So we got to the Distrikt at 5:45!
I think our driver was really fed up as we had been stuck in this area for most of the journey, but luckily the taxi was a fixed rate.
I don't have any photos of the hotel haha!
We checked in and were given 2 drinks tokens which we never got round to using. We got given room 504.
We put our bags in and then went back out after 6pm to just wander around.
One of the hotels on our road had some cool Fall/Autumn decorations outside.
We just walked around the block to get our bearings and see what we had nearby. I think we walked the wrong way as the area was a little rundown. But we saw 2 Bros pizza and decided that was our dinner choice.
We went back to the hotel to eat it too.
Excitingly we perched in the room to tuck into our pizza and again went back out straight afterwards!
We headed to W42nd street as we knew there were shops and things there.
We just kind of took in the atmosphere for a while and ended up in Spirit Halloween store which was kitsch but cool to see.
We were hunting for Times Square which we had loads of trouble finding
Somehow we made it to Madison Square Garden! Which was interesting as there seemed to be a game on and it was busy around there.
After our random walk I managed to direct us correctly to Times Square around 8pm. We had a browse in the Disney store and elsewhere but were getting pretty tired by this point!
We headed back to the hotel and went to bed at 9pm out of sheer tiredness.