Today was the unmissable trip to the statue of liberty. The plan was to get up real early and try and
beat the queues. The plan only partially succeeded. There wasn't a queue to buy the tickets but still over an hour once the ticket had been purchased before embarkation on the boat. My Top Tip:
Get to Battery Park and buy your ticket - make sure you get the ticket that gives you access to the monument base - GET THERE for around 0800. You can be on the first boat, and then when you get to the island go straight to the queue to go the monument base. Security is very tight. Don't take anything that you don't need to because you can only take camera's onto the monument, everything else has to go into a locker - $1 bill and your finger print required. I got heartily fed up of taking my trouser belt off and even my camera bag was deemed too big to go onto the monument!

TOP TIP number 2. Take a helicopter ride around New York - the New York New York trip from Liberty Helicopters was the trip that we did and Top Tip 2A is go from the WEST HELIPORT. The queues are smaller, they are less booked up. We managed to book and fly within the hour.

I suppose I ought to say 'guess where I am', but most of you will recognise the Wall Street bull immediately/ Yup. I am in the Big Apple, New York, New York. Apparently they needed to name it twice for some strange reason. Was it in case people didn't get the location the first time?
Lordy is it ever cold here. The air temp is around 40 degrees F, but the effects of the canyoning round the buildings makes the air feel a hell of a lot colder. I am wearing a coat that usually I can't wear in the UK as all it does, even on cold days, is make me sweat. Not so in New York. I am wearing it, my body is not sweating and only my exposed skin is cold. Cracking good coat - came into its own for the first time in ten years. And we used to think that we have cold weather in Gloucester !! Here I am styling the coat in times square - hands firmly stuffed into pockets.
Another odd effect of the canyoning is the NYPD and NYFD sirens. At ground level, you hardly notice them except when they are right on top of you, up in our hotel room on the 40th floor, we can here them all for miles around, and they never seem to stop.
Got slightly alarmed a few minutes ago, the lights went out on the empire state building, followed a few minutes later hordes of NYDB and NYFD cars and trucks screamed by sirens and blaring and driving against the traffic in the direction of the Empire State.
I guess that it was unconnected, the police and fire departments seem to go everywhere mob handed with lights blazing and sirens blaring. A quick search of New York websites revealed that the lights had gone out as part of Earth Hour. As far as I could see, most of the rest of New York didn't bother, but I could be wrong.