Day 2 in New York

After doing as much walking as we had the day before, we decided to cheat and take a subway downtown.

We rode down all the way to the One World Trade Center. Despite what we'd seen on the Internet, there were no dueling saxophinists, performance artists or Agent Smiths dodging bullets on the subway. It was quite dull.

We spent some time at the 9/11 memorial pools to reflect on the tragedy that had occured there over 20 years ago. It was an eerie place to visit and you could feel a strange silence in the atmosphere.

After that, Rachael convinced Andi to go up the tallest building in the western hemisphere.

Andi doesn't enjoy heights but suddenly the loftiness of his 17th floor hotel room no longer seemed to be a problem.

After a nerve-racking elevator ride up a dizzying 102 floors, there were some spectacular yet terrifying views to be seen.

After getting our feet back on the ground, we headed east, past Pier 17 to the Brooklyn Bridge and walked on over to Dumbo.

While we were there, we saw the famous view of the Manhatten Bridge through Washington street and then visited Plymouth street that joined it.

Another suggestion we had was to visit Grimaldi's pizza in Dumbo. We enjoyed one of the largest not-the-largest-pizza-on-the-menu pizzas we'd ever seen.

This was such a lovely place to eat and maybe one of our best memories from New York.

The boat that went to Liberty Island cost quite a bit and neither of us were particularly fussed about seeing Lady Liberty as we'd heard that she is somewhat underwhelming and more than half her height is from her pedestal (a 46m statue on a 47m pedestal).

So instead we decided to take the free(!) Staten Island ferry that basically got us close enough.

On the ferry we got an amazing view of the New York Skyline from the south.