New York

Cherie and I spent about 12 days at her brother and his wife's place in Norwalk, Connecticut, so any time we wanted to go to New York City, we had to jump on a Metro-North train to get into Grand Central Station.

Grand Central is beautiful and ridiculously chaotic with the hundreds of people who are moving through the main concourse at every time of the day.

I never really realised just how big Central Park was until we did a bus tour of uptown Manhattan. It's huge! A ridiculous 51 blocks long, and 3 blocks wide. The bus tour was two hours long and went from the south-west corner of the park all the way up to Harlem, across to the upper east side and back down to the hectic downtown area again.

It was actually really nice to just sit back for a couple of hours and enjoy the ride without trying to get from one place to another via the subway.

Oh and about the subway; if you're ever visiting NYC and need to get around, learn the subway. It's really not that hard with a map, even though it seems overwhelming at first. On our last holiday to the US, I let Cherie get us around on the subway. This time I actually took the time to figure it out for myself.

Times Square was amazing in the evening, as always. I got to see it last year, and I knew what it was like, but the pure magnitude of everything still surprised me.

We hit up a few bars, McSorley's Old Ale House probably being the highlight of the lot for me. In a nutshell, it's a very old Irish pub where you get two choices of beer; light or dark. And each round is two glasses of beer.

We ended up having about five rounds each, which sounds like a lot at two glasses a round, but the glasses are small.

The great part about the bar is you're seated wherever you fit, even if it's with complete strangers. We got to chat with a couple who were crawling a bunch of the oldest pubs in the city for the guy's birthday.

Food was always great, as it usually is in the US. The highlight was definitely Crif Dogs in NoHo. By far the best hot dogs I've had in the country. I had two chili dogs, and Cherie and James had the chihuahua, a bacon-wrapped dog topped off with avocado and sour cream.

At some point Cherie's friend, James, arrived to travel with us, so the last couple of day trips were with him aswell.

Those were the highlights of New York for me.

I've still gotta catch up on Philly and Portland, Maine. We're currently road-tripping through the south, heading to Mississippi tomorrow, so hopefully while on the road, I can catch up a bit!