In honor of Frank’s 40th Birthday, today we toured New York City on the Grayline hop on hop off bus. Atop the bus, we learned the history of the architecture of many of the buildings as we had a birds eye view of the city streets.
It was a beautiful day and very crowded in New York, so our guide told us that if we “hop off”, it may be difficult to get a seat when we “hop on”. Our first and only hop off stop was at Ground Zero.
As luck would have it, we were enjoying lunch in a Amish Buffet when a Port Authority officer came in for lunch. Kos struck up a conversation with him and the next thing we knew, he was bringing us into the ground zero site where only dignitaries are invited. He got us our tickets to enter the Memorial (we didn’t know we even needed tickets), and moved us up to the front of the line to enter. If we didn’t meet up with him, we would not have been able to go since the tickets were timed so not too many people enter at the same time. There was strict security as well.
After spending some time at the 9/11 Memorial, we walked through Battery Park along the river to pick up our bus for the remainder of the tour.
The monument above was formerly situated in the courtyard of the World Trade Center and when the buildings came down, there was very little damage to it. It’s now standing in Battery Park but there is talk about relocating it back to it’s original site.
After a long day, we went to Valencia, a Portuguese restaurant in Elizabeth for a wonderful dinner.
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