Author: lauramchugh

Cheesy? Yes, but we took the Hop On/Hop Off double decker bus tour around NYC today on Gray Line. It was perfect because you can 1) sit; 2) get a bit of relief from the heat/humidity; and 3) get elevated a bit for some photos. You do have to be careful to sit though, because some of the traffic signs breeze the top of your head as you whisk past them. And, you do have to be a bit careful not to believe everything you hear. Click click!

In no particular order:

The first place you go in NYC has to be the Empire State Building, right? We’d just been to Disneyland (California Adventures) and been on the Tower of Terror, which is a much shorter elevator ride, compared to this real-life adventure which, among all it’s other features (height, view, etc) is a stunning piece of art deco architecture. I’d been there 30 years ago and not much has changed, except that the World Trade Center is not there any more and that is a poignant reminder of what the world has been through in the past eight years.

The Empire State Building has 102 floors if you go all the way to the upper observatory. We only went to the 86th floor deck, but still stupendous views. One sad note – you could see to the south the entire Hudson River, including all the rescue equipment for the recent helicopter/plane crash.

My favorite photo of the day was from here too. On floor 80, while we were queuing around yet again (ESP has 73 elevators, and we swear there were about 73 lines too) we saw this series of windows with frosted glass on the bottom. I guess they want to be sure you pay for and go all the way to the deck for the E-ticket views. These windows were very Rene Magritte to me.

Don’t believe everything someone tells you. The tour guide on our open air bus ride today said that this building is the tallest apartment building in the world without any windows.

Claire and I spent all day worried for the people who live there, and who presumably pay sky-high Manhattan rents to do so. No windows to see this beautiful city??

I was so intrigued I “googled” it, and turns out we were taken for a ride! The building is AT&T’s server farm or phone switching center (not sure which). The floors are 18′ tall and are used to house computer or phone equipment that not only doesn’t need to enjoy the skyline, but also benefits from not having any sunshine in the building from a cooling perspective.

Okay – I hope they didn’t dupe us on the ticket prices for the tour too!

This trip to NYC is resulting in many photos, ideas, etc. so I’m going to post them separately, otherwise my post for today would be hellatiously long.

Here’s an index of Day 1 posts:

1. Wrong Information from Tour Guides
2. Empire State Building
3. Architecture from Gray Lines Tour
4. Pizza! Pizza!

This is too cool. I’m on a Virgin America flight from SF to NYC and I am on the internet!

I took this photo using my MacBook Pro camera, then got on the internet and onto my blog here, and now created this post. How exciting!