Penultimate Day, Guggenheim, Grand Central Station

It's amazing how much you can achieve in a few short hours when you are running for a deadline. This is our last day in New York and as expected, there was still a long list of must sees: it was impossible to see them so I had to prioritise.

I wanted definitely to see the Guggenheim, recently featured in The Worlds top 20 most beautiful museums. Check out the website.. there are some lovely photographs of some very beautiful museums.

It opened at 10am so I headed out at 9.35 walking at a pace along the southern and eastern sides of Central Park. With regret I passed the Frick Collection and The Met(!!) The museum mile had another name this morning. It was the smokers mile. I had not seen as many people smoking as I saw on the way to the Guggenheim. These were commuters on their way to work, having a last puff.

 The Guggenheim is beautiful inside. You are not permitted to take photographs inside. Here are some of my shots:

 My favourite exhibition was a collection of photos of teenagers by Rineke Dijkstra whose purpose was to catch people when emotions are conflicting. She had shots of young adults in the French Foreign Legion, the Israeli Army, young women standing naked with their newborn babies and videos of teenagers dancing alone in her studio to music, looking self conscious and then abandoning this. It was excruciating and strangely magnetic.

Some more of Central Park..
my serpinous route back to the hotel
from the Guggenheim

Opposite our hotel window

 The hotel apparently was to be full tonight, so we couldn't do a late checkout. I had packed, so I decided there was just enough time to race to Grand Central Station. This was worth the quick visit.. It really is an impressive example of late 1800s architecture.

 And I found another one of these...

An Apple store in Grand Central Station

Which brings me to the name "big apple". I'm not sure of the origin of the term unless New York was considered the "apple" of America's eye. In any case there are a few apples around.

(13 July back at home. I just looked up the etymology of "Big Apple"- it's complicated)

 We were all packed by midday and arranged for our bags to be held. We also accepted the offer of the porter to arrange a private car company to take us to the airport. "he works with us" said the porter. This was a bit more expensive ($60) but gave the security of knowing he would be here and "he has a slightly larger boot". My advice is .. Don't . Just hail a cab. The guy we had was in a real hurry and we had an hour of him tooting, changing lanes constantly and responding in monosyllables to any question.

some views from the car to JFK

My impression is that if ever you get a service with the tip "built in" there is no incentive to make it a pleasant experience, and you won't get one. Or are these the people who never attracted tips so they incorporated them into their business plan? Which came first.. The poor service or the built in tips?...the chicken or the egg? Oh.. Forgot to tell you that after storing our bags and waiting in the hotel lobby we did a quick ice cream dash to Grom.

This was our penultimate New York dining experience and it lived up to expectations as well as providing an excuse to dump quite a lot of small change. At JFK all went smoothly and we had time to spare. V and I had a quite filling roast vegetable pizza. On the flight to Los Angeles we had quite a chatty steward who gave us lots of answers to our questions about Qantas, airbuses and travel.

 If you are reading this it means we got home safely and I posted this last post of the blog which i am writing on the ipad at Los Angeles airport in a much nicer Terminal.. Terminal International Bradley. I pretty much wrote the blog to force myself to keep a diary and sort my photos. So thanks for following the journey (if you have). I have only a couple of regrets. There was one thing I really wanted to do that I didn't which was to visit a shop in Vancouver on behalf of our friend, Lady Demelza, but our last night in that city wasn't as anticipated and I never got there. So sorry Lady Demelza! I also realise that keeping a blog does take an enormous amount of time which means for late nights or missing some outings. I am not sure if I would do this again in such detail... But maybe I would!