Dropping Off At: New York City (Part One)

I don't know how long my sister and I have been talking about going to New York for. It's been at least five years and in January 2014 we finally booked our flights and hotel to New York and even then it didn't really hit me that we were going. 
Finally at three in the morning on the 28th of December my mam woke both me and my sister us telling us to get changed and ready because we were leaving in half an hour. So, half asleep I managed to make it into the car and get to the airport.
The flight was about seven hours and 45 minutes long but it felt like it lasted an age. Even between the food that we were served and the movies that I ended up watching, I couldn't wait to just land in America, get our luggage and into the hotel. Not much happened that first day we were there. We didn't get to the hotel until quite late in the afternoon and after an early morning start, the travelling and the time difference change we didn't have a lot of energy left it us. So, we rested up to get ready for the second day. 
Now the second day held a little bit more for the both of us. The first thing that we needed to do was to pick up out city passes which gave us entry to a lot of the sights in New York and fast track some of the lines and our Broadway tickets to watch 'Les Mis' so we didn't have to worry about that. To do those, we had to walk through Times Square. This is one place that I can genuinely say looks like all of the photos that you see. It was amazing and it didn't exactly hit me that we were walking through Times Square until a little later on. 
After that we headed down to Bryant Park which was holding the most beautiful Christmas market that I've ever seen. There were some amazing stalls there that held the most gorgeous pieces of jewellery and Christmas ornaments, amongst other things. It could've spent ages walking around the market place and seeing everything. There was so much going on it was hard to tear your eyes away from everything. We spent a lot of time in there and it was starting to become dark when we knew that we had to get going out of there. After that we got some food and decided to head back to the hotel and get some rest since the next day meant that it was going to be an early start. 






An early start was for the fact that we had already booked tickets to go to the Crown of the Statue of Liberty. Since it was a fair bit of a trek from where our hotel was we tried to get out on time. However, that never goes to plan and we were almost late especially since the subway decided that that would be the day that the line we needed to take wouldn't work. There was absolutely no need to panic though since we made it there in more than enough time. 

After waiting in line for a little and then going through security, we got on a ferry that took us to Liberty Island. It was freezing on that boat and I regretted not taking a few more layers. Once we finally got to the island though it wasn't as bad and we wasted no time getting into the statue. We showed our tickets and then put our bags in a locker since we weren't allowed to take any backpacks with us and went through security again and then made in into the actual statue. 
We went around the museum first which was more interesting than I initially thought that it would be. It gave me the chance to take photos next to a life sized replica of the face of Lady Liberty and learn a lot more about the history of the statue and how it came to be. Having a huge interest, I was so excited to see how the people managed to get the whole statue from France to New York and it was some of the most interesting things I've ever read. 

Our trip the the Crown then started. The steps didn't take as long as I thought it would at first. Well, not to the pedestal anyway. I was in pretty high spirits at that point and it was nice to know that we conquered one part of the statue. However, we then had to go up a narrower flight of stairs to get to the Crown and it was only then I realised how far away it was from the pedestal. As well as the stairs being a lot narrower they also were in a spiral, with another spiral set winding in it for people who were going back down. I've never been too good with stairs so I was extremely shaky when we were going up them. It was worth it when we got to the top though even though it felt like the statue was swaying a lot of the time. The trip on the way down wasn't any smoother as much as I would've liked it to be but it was a great experience and I was really glad I got the chance to go there. 

 After that we headed back to the hotel to get ready for another day.