Grand Central Station
On Crystal’s recommendation, we first visited Grand Central Station. As expected, this was easy to reach by metro. So we got ourselves a $33 seven-day ticket for the metro and began the trip.
Upon arrival, on our way to the main terminal, we now walked along seemingly endless corridors and passed about 40 tracks. Finally, we entered the main terminal, which impressed us with its sheer size. Of course, we had seen pictures of the terminal before, but in person you get a completely different impression of the building.
Statue of Liberty
Following Crystal’s recommendations and Lisa’s guidebook, we head to Whitehall St. to take the Staten Island Ferry 🚢. This offers not only a free crossing to Staten Island, but also maybe one of the best possible views on the Statue of Liberty.
Unfortunately, on our trip leaving NY, we were not lucky enough to get a ferry with an outdoor terrace. This situation was only worsened by the condition of the windows, which were coated with a thick layer of smock and therefore barely transparent.
Additionally, the ferry was cleared at the St. George Ferry Terminal by the NYPD 🚓, since a passenger had probably caught at least 3 golden GTA stars, many thanks at this point from us.
So it turned out that we had to switch ferries at the St. George Ferry Terminal to one which had an outdoor terrace 😁!
This finally enabled us to take very nice pictures:
National September 11 Memorial and Museum
After visiting the Statue of Liberty, we went to the 9/11 Memorial Museum and also there we continued to have a lucky streak, because we were the last guests who were admitted 😊.
Despite my mistrust in Lisa’s guidebook, we even entered the museum for free. It turns out that every Tuesday from 17:00 the entrance fee is waived.
The museum is huge and has many exhibits that were both interesting and sad. One exhibit that stand out to me was the one with phone calls and voice messages. It’s a very emotional exhibit that gives a glimpse into the final moments of those who were lost on that day.
Then we went home and made some baked eggs to process what we had experienced. A pretty successful day!