New York New York - so good they named it twice!

Well, we made it back to New York on Monday 23rd August 2010. We dropped off 'The Beast' in the hire car place and were really sorry to see it go - we had travelled 10,257.1 miles together! and visited 24 states - New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan and Ontario. Our song for the road was 'Hey there Delilah'

We stayed in the Pennsylvania Hotel, beautiful foyer but when you get upstairs it's a little bit tired but is right in the centre of everything. Walking distance to Times Square, The Empire State Building etc and right on top of Pen Metro Station - line 1 took us everywhere we wanted to go!

We spent our first day in the Natural History Museum, which is huge. We took the extra tours following the Astronauts as they prepared to repair the Hubble Space Telescope and then followed them into space - really fascinating. The next tour was in the Rose Centre for Earth and Space, we sat in the auditorium on reclining seats and the screen was a huge dome which reflected the night sky - we then took a tour into deep space - magical.

We also walked through as much of the museum as we could before they closed at 5.45pm. The dinosaurs were the best as a lot of them were the original bones.

We decided to take the free boat to Staten Island which passes the Statue of Liberty because the weather was extremely wet, we didn't fancy visiting the islands. We had a great view and took all the pics we needed. This was also on my birthday - Happy Birthday me x

In the evening Mike had booked a show in the James Theatre off Broadway, we saw American Idiot, a. Because we knew all the songs on the album and b. Because we didn't think it was one which would travel to London and therefore exclusive - it was wonderful and we really enjoyed it.

Our last day in the USA we spent in Central Park. Thankfully the weather was glorious. first we took a rowing boat out and Mike and Chris rowed us around the lake. Ffi had a go too but I just sat back and relaxed - a good thing too with what was to come.

We hired cruiser bikes and set off around the park, we did the full 6 miles around the perimeter on crazy bikes with no brakes - you had to press back on the peddles to slow down and stop - I struggled as the little Asian woman saw, when she was crossing the road at a crossing and I sailed through the red light, dragging my feet on the floor, desperately trying to stop, failing but failed to hit her!!!

On our last night we celebrated at Statlers Restaurant, we had a beautiful meal - Mike had the biggest fillet steak we've ever seen. A fitting meal at the end of a wonderful holiday.