A Bit of Philly and More Apple

On our way to Philadelphia - the rain started. Rain like we hadn't seen in more than two and a half months. It poured and poured and poured some more. We were taken to a motel about half an hour outside of the city centre and held ourselves up there for the rest of the day. We watched as the rain became worse, watched some TV and wrote a little. But to be truthful - it was nice to relax. Having been constantly on the go since we dropped the car off in Jacksonville, we were a little glad of the time we spent doing little to nothing.

By the morning, the rain had given up, the sun was out, and so we ventured to Philly's centre. A bus and train ride later, found us on Market West Street, a few blocks from the Liberty Bell. I didn't know much about this tourist hot spot, but we went through security and trundled on through to increase our knowledge.

Apparently it has something to do in representing the Liberty of Americans, the Freedom of Americans, and those liberties that were fought to uphold or gain. It was pretty cool to see another piece of history, so we took yet more photographs and left happy in the knowledge that we'd learnt a little.

We asked the very obliging security lady outside to help us with directions to the 'Rocky' steps... you know, the steps Stallone runs up and down incescently in the movie. (I hope you know, as I've never seen it). So roughly two hours later, a few wrong turns, a bit of shopping (for a much needed coat - so it was justified), and after a few more photos, we eventually found Rocky's memorial, walked (not ran) up the steps and posed at the top. Happy but cold, we staggered back down the steps, and walked back to the train station, more than ready to drag our bleeding stumps of feet back to the motel room.

We were going to haul ourselves over to New Jersey, to visit a shop owned by a movie Director who Callum aspires to be - but once we'd seen how far it was, we decided to spend our last few days back in New York, before our train ride to Michigan.

As we'd enjoyed the last hostel so much, we booked ourselves back in, and straight away headed down to Ground Zero. Which was quite special, and quite moving. There's construction going on there now, building new 'twin towers', lots of people taking snaps, but it felt wrong taking photographs of a site where so many had needlessly lost their lives. We sat for a while and looked on at the area of destruction, paid our respects and quietly moved on.

Wall Street was next which I'd looked forward to and it didn't disappoint, especially when we found Tiffany's! We had a wonder round and after I felt rather out of place in Tiff's we walked down to the Statue of Liberty ferry, which was quite a spectacle. Ducking from the Seagulls who we were sure were going to 'bring us luck', we docked at the island housing the big green lady - we didn't go ashore, we stayed put and arrived back on solid ground a half hour later.

The view coming back to the City was special. The buildings towered over one another, demonstrating New York's remarkable architecture, beautiful in it's simplistic modesty. I didn't want to disembark, but the crew made us, setting foot back into Battery Park, we started the long walk home, two hours later, we made it.

For the entire time I had been planning this trip, I knew I wanted to do the Sex and The City tour in New York - to see the sights in the much loved by me and many TV series and film. So what happened when I went online to book myself a seat??? FULLY BOOKED. How gutted was I??? Quite.

On our last day we went up to the Natural History Museum (Used in Night At The Museum with Ben Stiller), spent 15 bucks on getting in and spent a little over 4 hours wondering around. It was a little bit fantastic. We were educated in all eras of our quite magnificent world, came out of the building feeling a little more intelligent and hit Strawberry Fields, Central Park.

A small memorial to Mr John Lennon is surrounded by a 'quite zone' of the park. People come here to be at peace, and I could see why as it was beautiful - people repsected each others peace for the first time we'd seen in New York.

So we headed back to the hostel to pack up our belongings for the next day of travelling. Our room was full, 4 bunk beds in the space we'd put one double bed back home - trying to sort our stuff out was difficult and frustrating. We battled through and eventually everything was in it's rightful place. So off to sleep we went, ready for our train journey ahead.

More on that journey later!

Jen