After nearly 21 hours of flying time plus another 6 or so in airport time we are finally home.

Having spent the last month in the United States we are now on our way back home. I am writing this on the first of the two flights we have, the transcontinental flight from New York to Los Angeles where we’ll connect for our Sydney bound flight.

We have about 20 hours of flying time to enjoy as well as five or six hours of airport time. Then our holiday will be over and it’s back to reality.

So, epic usa trip 2011? At least I have my epic month in Japan coming up soon. I’ll be travelling with Navillus and Jaytee from team SOGC to the land of crazy vending machines, animu and bullet trains.

Today is our last full day both on holiday and in New York. Five days really isn’t long enough to even scratch the surface of New York city, let alone the surrounding areas. At the very least I’d like to think I’ve managed to explore through a decent cross section and have found inspiration in the things I have seen.

Our day started with a food tour of the borough of Greenwich. This historic district, one of the few not following the traditional New York grid, dates back hundreds of years and was the centre of beatnik and bohemian culture in New York before both were priced out of the market. Now it’s home to many small and interesting food shops that serve some of the best food on Manhattan Island.

Our tour started with New York style pizza, a thin crispy crust, with a delicious fresh tomato base and delicious cheese. Very simple, but few places get it exactly right. We then sampled cheeses from Greenwich’s best known specialty cheese shop. Along the way we were given a lot of information about the history of the area beginning with the farmland origins, to the city getaway, and then to the immigrant revival and the later beatnik era.

The tour was three hours long and included enough food to forgo the need for a separate lunch. After parting ways with the group, we explored the rest of the Greenwich area and began to make plans for the rest of the day. Unfortunately our plans included visiting the New York Fire Department Museum which is closed on Monday’s, so we resorted to further exploration.

Deciding on an early and light dinner, we headed back to Joe’s Pizzeria for a slice of their epic pizza. Afterwards, craving dessert, we headed over to Milk & Cookies for an icecream sandwich – icecream sandwiched with two cookies. This place came highly recommended on our tour and we were even given a sample of their cookies, which are truly epic.

Though we had finished dinner and dessert, the night was still young. With all of our plans exhausted, we made our way back to midtown entirely without plans. Hopping off at Times Square, we found a spot to relax and enjoy the view. After a while I had the idea to finally visit the Rockerfeller center and go to their observation deck for one last look at the New York skyline – this time at night.

Finding the Rockerfeller centre is easy enough, it’s right near Radio City and has enough neon lights to make it stand out even over the glow of New York. Finding the entrance to the observation deck, on the other hand, proved to be more of a challenge. After finally discovering it’s entrance is actually one level below ground, we soon found ourselves 67 floors above street level Manhattan. This place easily has the best view of the city by far, with it’s location in midtown it is surrounded by New York in all directions.

The name observation deck is a bit  of a misnomer – the observation ‘deck’ is three levels with plenty of outdoors space. Each level of balconies gives increasingly good views, with the third and final level giving the easily the best view in the whole of Manhattan. It is essentially the roof of the building with no real obstructions.

After observing the city for quite a while we decided to leave. On the way out we found a strange room full of lights that looked like it was responding to the mere presence of people in it. In fact it was, with a light show being coordinated by the very location of people tagged and tracked by a computer system. Just walking around caused the lights to change and every so often patterns would emerge and the system would respond with an impressive display.

We spent quite a while in there playing around with the light patterns, as well as watching people’s reactions as they entered and found out what the room was doing.

We finally managed to free ourselves from the light room and headed back to ground level. The lifts taking groups up and down the tower have an interesting feature – a glass ceiling. The lift shafts are full of lights and you can see the top of the building approach and disappear as you ascend and descend in the lift.

Craving more to do after this, we headed to the rink at the Rockerfeller where we found that even at 10:30pm on a Monday morning the bar was still doing good business. We stayed and had a few drinks, then a few more, all while watching people move around as well as the fountain at the statue of Prometheus.

We finally left, some time around 11pm, and I was absolutely killing for a cheese pretzel. Failing that a New York style hotdog – which is really just a beef hotdog with ketchup, mustard and onion. Fortunately, this being New York, even at 11pm the hot dog vendors were out in force. I easily located one on the way back to our hotel and got myself the greatest hot dog ever.

And that wraps up our last full day. I’ve had an epic month in the United States and really don’t want to go back to Australia. Sadly money, visa waiver requirements and airline bookings all conspire to send me back to Sydney. Hopefully I will find myself back here soon.

Today we decided to buck the trend of the previous few days and head north. Along the eastern side of Central Park is an art gallery known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The building itself is quite impressive. It’s entranceway is low and the revolving door serves to slow down the people coming into the museum. Once inside the space opens up before you revealing the spiral walkway, winding around the building. Sadly the skylight was closed so the room was quit a bit darker than it should have been. The museum also prohibited photography on any level other than the ground floor.

We had some cheap eats outside at the nearest food vendor and headed onwards to explore Central Park.

Central park is big, really big. To put it’s size in some form of perspective it is the equivalent land area to 150 New York city blocks.

Inside the park about halfway down, starting about where the Guggenheim Museum is, is the old water reservoir. A large lake-like body of water which used to be used to supply water to New York City. Now it’s just a lake with a walking path around it’s circumference and some pretty views of the city.

We headed south, heading through the park itself. The park is divided into lots of sections divided by walking paths and roads. There is the constant flux of people moving through the park, and even more congregating at the various points of interest. There are people walking dogs, on the grass people are relaxing, playing ball games and even sun baking.

Continuing south, we headed out of the Park and along Madison Avenue which runs parallel to the park. We continue to walk past lots of shops, and a few Cafe’s stopping once to have afternoon tea and a drink. We end up walking so far that we find ourselves at another New York landmark – Grand Central Terminal.

The main entrance quickly makes way into this giant room, the main concourse, swarming with people going in every direction.

Located behind the Grand Central Terminal is another famous landmark, the Chrysler Building. Both of these buildings were declared awesome by Michael Bay and were thus destroyed in the New York sequence in Armageddon.

Continuing on, we find ourselves at a small outpost of hope for any expat Australian living in New York.

Hours of walking can make you tired, not to mention thirsty. Not much further and we end resting in the park outside the New York Public Library. With chairs, a shop for food and drinks, and free wifi you could easily spend hours there relaxing. The park has a great view of the surrounding city, especially the Empire State Building clearly visible in this next photo from the spot we had staked ourselves.

This pretty much marked the end of the exploration phase of the day. After this we relaxed for a while, taking in the sights, and then headed off in search of dinner. We ended up back on the same street as we were on last night, but this time we went to a pub/restaurant which served decent beer and food.

And that capped off the day.

I have another couple of observations I’d like to share about New York. While walking around I couldn’t help but notice the sheer amount of scaffolding there seems to be setup around the city. It can often seem as though you spend quit a lot of time walking underneath it. It is so common, in fact, that often you forget it is there until you are already half-way through it.

Another, though much lesser in scope, is these snack food world shops that are present around Times Square. I’m not sure how many ‘world’ shops there are but we did find an M&M’s world and a Pop Tarts World.

Before I get on with what I did today, I just want to mention something that is something of a New York phenomenon. Almost everywhere you go in mid and downtown New York, you are almost always guaranteed to be within a block or two of one of these:

These hotdog and pretzel stands are everywhere dispensing cheap food all day. I’ve even seen intersections with four of them, one on each corner, all doing business. Street food is common in many cities, however, I’ve never seen them have this much reach across a city before.

Another thing i’ve never seen before, with the sole exception being midnight on George Street in Sydney, is the stupidly high ratio of taxi’s to normal cars. While at the top of the Empire State Building (more on this later) I played a little game counting the cars going down what I think was 5th Avenue. Out of every 6 cars that drove past 5 were a taxi. This wasn’t the exception to the rule, however, as every other street I observed also had a high ratio of taxis over normal cars.

So, back to the events of today. We had previously booked tickets to visit the Empire State Building and had decided that today was the day we would go. It was a nice, cool, and clear skied day so we’d be able to see quite a lot. Taking the trusty subway down to 33rd street, we quickly orient ourselves and walk to the observatory entrance. We are greeted with a nice art deco lobby and the beginnings of possibly the most epic queue ever.

Fortunately most of the queue was empty and we quickly made our way through the vastness that is the observatory queue system, which snakes around the building taking many turns until it finds it’s way to the centre where the lifts are.

From the ground floor, you take a lift up to the 80th floor. You then get out and get in another queue where you take a lift, or the stairs like many (including me), up to the 86th floor which is the main observatory deck. From this you have a full 360 degree view of the surrounding city from both it’s indoor and outdoor areas.

From this level you can also buy access to the 102nd floor, which is the secondary observatory deck high up in the more rounded spire-like part of the building. This section is quite small, most of the floor space seems taken up by the mechanicals and as a consequence not many people can be up here at the same time. The added expense also deters people from venturing up here, so it’s actually the best place to really take in the view. The primary observation deck is just too crowded to really take your time in taking in the view.

The photo above neatly encapsulates the situation I explained above, with regards to the ratio of taxis to normal cars. Here you can see the one normal car is surrounded. Certainly a contrast with San Francisco, by all accounts a taxi free city.

Afterwards we had some lunch and headed south towards the Flatiron building. Near that famous building there is a park which has, among other things, a popular burger shop. Not just slightly popular, ridiculously so, with the most epic single queue I have ever seen for food. The queue was so large it was impossible to get the proper sense of scale from a single photo.

Most of the people standing in line here, going towards the burger shop at the back of the photo, are waiting in this queue. It gets better, though.

Most of the poeple standing here on the path are also in this queue. There is a circular seating are in which the shop resides, and the queue takes a straight line out to the surrounding path and then winds around the seating area. The queue wraps at least two thirds of the way around the seating area which is not small. Must be one helluva burger they are waiting for.

We then set off in a random direction, ultimately ending up on the western side of the island. From here we follow the water’s edge until we end up at the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier which has been turned into a museum.

On the way we saw a pair of helicopters land at this small helipad right next to the river.

While the exhibits are familiar, being able to explore an old aircraft carrier and truly get a sense of it’s scale was pretty good. They also have a Concorde (another one, I know) and the USS Growler, a Grayback class submarine.

From the flight deck, you get a good view of a large number of aircraft of historical significance set against the new york skyline.

There would be at least one photo of the USS Growler if I hadn’t somehow completely messed it up

As we arrived later in the day, around 3:30pm, we only had a few hours to explore. As you’d imagine, with the size of the carrier, that only got us through part of it before we had to leave. You really could spend all day here.

Heading out and walking east, we found a street that I can only equate to something like King street in Newtown. Lots of compact restaurants and cafes with lots of pedestrian traffic, close to theatres and not far from anything. It was here, I decided, that we would have dinner.

We explored the area while waiting for a suitable time for dinner, as it was only 6pm then. We quickly found that we were only a handful of blocks from Times Square, and thus easy walking distance back to our hotel.

After dinner, we slowly made or way back to our hotel via Times Square. Even though it was 9pm, the square was still absolutely packed and the whole place was lit up brighter than day.

At the end of my last post I said that we were taking the Amtrak to New York. On the morning of the 26th we did just that, travelling north from Washington DC’s Union Station to New York’s Penn Station. The entire trip was decently comfortable and there weren’t many people on the train so we got as much space as we needed. We also ate on the trip, courtesy of the food car.

After leaving the station we hop in to one of many of New York’s famous yellow taxi’s to get to our hotel. Our hotel is a few blocks south of Central Park, in a nice area close to just about everything, or at least the means to get just about anywhere. With the desire to just get out and wander strong, we head outwards into the unknown.

After walking around for a while, we stop for drinks in Rockerfeller Plaza. They were advertising spiked lemonades as a good way of cooling down, so we took them for their word and tried it out. It ended well.

As usual the point was just to get a sense of where we were in our new home away from home. While we were walking around, I turned a corner only to find I had utterly blundered my way into Times Square. I had no idea we were that close to this odd location. It resembles the worlds largest ADD soothing animated billboard.

Virtually every sign is an animated billboard of some kind. The photo above only shows one direction of the street, facing the other way around looks quite similar.

There are so many people swarming around here, definitely a place you’d want to avoid in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Actually, scratch that, avoid New York in general in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

After walking around we found ourselves at the famous 5th Avenue Apple store which appears, from ground level, like a glass cube. From a distance you can’t see the underground complex at all. Once you get closer, though, you can make out the glass stairs and lift which move people down one level to the shop floor.

Ricci was in need of a new iPod, so she bought herself a new iPod Touch. Even with the exchange rate and such she still saved at least 50 dollars over the Australia price.

After more walking around, we started to get pretty hungry. We found a small fast food place and proceeded in for delicious foods. As it turns out this place has won lots of awards for their food, chief among which are their chips (er, fries) which are really quite good. Not as crispy as I’d like, they probably need to give them a better second fry or something, but full of delicious potato flavour including tasty bits of potato skin. I’m only including the photo below because it’s symmetry and composition were a complete fluke, I just had the camera on the table and randomly pressed the shutter.

On our second day we started out with more purpose, to travel to the south end of the city in Battery Park and see both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. With our trusty unlimited ride passes, we took the subway down from 59th street all the way to Battery Park.

Arriving at Battery park, I started having flashbacks to playing Deus Ex. In particular seeing the memorial and Castle Clinton in their expected places caused me to start looking around for things like the vending machine that lets you sneak past the NSF. Even the inside of Castle Clinton isn’t too far off the in-game representation. Clearly the people who made that game did their research.

The ferry takes 10 minutes (perceptual time only, real time may vary) or so to reach it’s first destination – Liberty Island. Because of the timing of our outing all the tickets to the Liberty itself were sold out, but we could get a walking tour of the island which had interesting stories about the history of the island and, more importantly, the Statue herself.

After a while we headed back to the ferry for the second part of this trip, Ellis island. This island was where the vast numbers of immigrants coming in to the US via New York were processed.

Ellis island was closed in the 1950’s, and has since been turned over to become a museum piece. We arrived here fairly late, around 5:30pm and had to abbreviate our tour around this place. Much like Liberty Island, there is an audio tour of the place which tells you much of it’s history and some of the stories of people who have been through here.

Fourty minutes later and we found ourselves having to head out, as the place was closing. That was too bad, at least we got to see a fair bit first. Another quick ferry ride an we were back at Battery Park.

We then decided to take advantage of our southerly location on the island and take a walk to the site of the former World Trade Center, also known as Ground Zero. Regardless of your thoughts on America and it’s politics, you have to admit that in recent history few other events have managed to directly and indirectly affect so many people. The site, now, is a massive construction zone where workers are busily working on the new One World Trade Plaza  building as well as the memorial site and some mass transit complex.

You also can’t help but feel saddened by the memorial wall dedicated to the rescue services personnel, in particular the fire services who were lost that day saving others. We ate at a nearby pizza place opposite the site with an upstairs eating area which overlooks a small plaza around the corner from the WTC site. I couldn’t help but think about the reactions people must have had, being that close, to the whole event as it unfolded.

Night time is strange, it stays light for quite a while and then becomes quite dark quickly. After dinner we took a walk around the area a bit more and then decided to take the subway back to our hotel.

Tomorrow we will be scaling the heights of the city as we visit one of the cities most famous buildings, the Empire State Building.

The after effects of the previous day of driving had hit hard and as a result we ended up oversleeping. Waking up to find the day half over, we headed out into the wilds of inner city DC in search of some indoor entertainment. We decided to head in the direction of the National Mall and go to the Museum of Natural History.

The museum is quite large and we only got through part of it before it closed (at 7:30pm). We took the scenic, and unintentionally long, route through the museum as it was closing and found entire sections on minerals, crystals, meteorites and volcanoes that we hadn’t seen on our way through before.

Afterwards we headed out for dinner, choosing to go to the other restaurant with a brewery we found a few days prior. Called the District Chop House, it serves delicious beer made right there in the shop.

The District Chop House easily has the best beer we’ve had in DC, and up there among the best we’ve had in the US. They do a really good Amber Ale which puts anything I’ve had in Australia to shame.

In stark contrast to the 24th, the 25th had an early start and something planned which gave us a reason to get up on time. I had booked a tour of the US Capitol building, the iconic building which lies in the centre of the city.

The building in the foreground of the photo immediately above is the Botanical Gardens. We would like to have visited this but just ran out of time, there is just too many things to do here especially if you want to explore everything properly.

We walked around from the side of the building facing the Mall to the front entrance side. To accommodate the large number of visitors, the government decided to build the aptly named Visitors Centre underground in front of the building. This is the gateway for all visitors to the Capitol Building and houses a ‘restaurant’ and museum. It is also the departure point for the guided tours which run very frequently.

We arrived quite ahead of time, with plans to browse the museum while waiting, but instead were offered an earlier time slot. Taking the opportunity to get the tour started, we accepted and joined the earlier group. The tour isn’t that long but it takes you through some interesting rooms including the old supreme court room, the rotunda underneath the dome, and one of the statuaries.

After the tour, we had some lunch and explored the museum. Aside from landmark moments in the history of congress, the museum had models showing the development of the area of DC immediately surrounding the Capitol building during it’s many stages of construction and reconstruction as they expanded the building and it’s connecting facilities. It also has a photo showing that many of the buildings are connected together with an automated subway system awesomely similar to the one in Fallout 3’s expansion Broken Steel.

We then took the underground link between the Capitol and the Library of Congress. Going outside is for suckers.

Most of the Library prohibits photography except for the main hall, where I took a few photos including one of the ceiling and one of the mosaic depicting Minerva.

After exploring the Library for a while, where we saw the main reading room and a number of interesting exhibits showcasing the unique collection the library has on the pre-colonial South and Central American culture, we headed back to the Mall to visit a few other sites that we hadn’t gotten around to yet.

We decided to make a trip down the Mall to the Washington Monument, then across to the White House, then back to the Mall for a trip down to the Lincoln Memorial and then finally a trip down the Potomac to the Jefferson Memorial.

This is also our last day in Washington DC. Tomorrow we are catching the Amtrak train to New York.

Today we made an exception from our usual rule of never being in charge of the vehicle that took us to our destinations and so we rented ourselves a car to make the epic journey from Washington DC to Mill Run in Pennsylvania.

After heading to Union Station, where the hire car facilities are, we got our car and set of. With our trusty GPS giving me instructions, I managed to only get lost twice. Washington DC has some strange road intersections and it can be on occasion confusing as to where your road goes. Driving on the wrong side didn’t help matters much, but didn’t hinder my progress too much. In fact I only veered on to the wrong side of the road once on the whole trip outside a petrol station on a dead road with no lane markers. No other cars were around and I corrected myself quickly.

Our trip out of the DC downtown was meant to be a 5 minute drive to the first of many interstates (think freeway), but instead ended up being a confused scenic trip past the citadel (Pentagon), and Arlington Cemetery.

Once we got on the interstate system it was quite easy. The whole trip was long and fairly tedious but we made good time and found ourselves on Mill Run Road with plenty of time to spare. Once we got nearby, relatively speaking, we started seeing signage directing us towards the house site. Useful, as without them we would have probably driven past the site without even knowing.

Before you get to see the house you first go through the visitors centre. It’s a small facility with a gift shop, cafe, restrooms and is the departure point for the in depth tours.

Before long we were on the tour, which took us down a meandering driveway down to the house itself. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935, it is a stunningly beautiful house built right into the landscape and the Bear Run creek waterfall giving it the name Fallingwater.

The house is built into the landscape rather than just on it, the rocks the house sits in are connected to the house in many places and even present themselves indoors. The use of natural materials, many quarried only hundreds of meters from the house itself, further tie the house to it’s environment.

The house, as a museum, is unique in that it has most if not all of the original furniture.

The tour took us through the entire house, and let us take photos. A lot of the rooms are quite hard to photograph, due to their size. It’s also difficult to translate how well the house is designed to feel as you move from room to room. Corridors are narrow and have a low ceiling, a method called compression. The result is that the room you step into opens up before you, a release. A combination of inbuilt furniture and structural elements draw the eye to the windows, and the view.

The tour started in the kitchen, took us around to the cave-like front entrance, and then meandered through the house visiting almost every room. We then left the main house through the bridge and walked up to the guest house. Because it was raining we then double backed, rather than going out through the guest house terrace, and went to the garage area. The tour ended there after a short presentation from the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the group that own and maintain Fallingwater.

After the tour we walked to the ‘view’, the location where the classical shot of the house is taken. We sat there watching the house and the waterfall for a while before deciding that it was getting late and we had to start heading back to DC.

One long drive later we were back at Union Station returning our car and heading back to the hotel. We took the Metro back to Gallery Pl and Chinatown, the same station we went to the other day, but found ourselves stuck there as the trains had just shut down (at 12am). Fortunately we weren’t too far from our hotel so we walked, and on the way I took this photo from the National Mall.

The next part of our trip takes us into the nations capital, Washington DC. After our early morning flight and airport transfer, we find ourselves at our hotel which is right near the Museum of Air and Space and the National Mall.

First day we went around the Museum of Space and Air. Like with every other first day I didn’t take my camera so all I have are some rubbish phone camera photos. I won’t post them because they probably will make eyes bleed.

We did manage to see some cool stuff, they have a huge (really) planetarium where we saw a feature on black holes and other cool space stuff. Nothing beats seeing that stuff taking up your entire vision all the way to your peripheries.

We also saw the Apollo 11 Command Module, the backup Skylab station, Russian and American ICBM’s and a Cray 1 supercomputer, among other things.

The museum, like most in Washington DC, has free entry for the public.

By the time we got out we had dinner, planned a few things for the next few days and called it a day.

The following day, our 22nd day in the US, we took the Metro to the Chinatown/Downtown area where there are, among other things, lots of cafes and bars as well as a few interesting museums. Today we decided to go to the International Spy Museum. The Spy museum has  a large showcase of artefacts from the world of espionage and while it’s very over the top American in it’s execution it really does have a lot of interesting information.

While exploring the area we came across a park with statues and a large fountain, a cafe with it’s own brewery (two, in fact, but the first one we decided to have dinner at), and the National Archives which we then decided to explore.

I took the photo above with my Sister standing in front of the fountains, though that probably didn’t need explaining. Update: I have linked this photo to a larger version.

The National Archives contains lots of American history in the form of documents. The documents are then used to create exhibits that are used to showcase, in great detail, the revolutionary and civil war eras of the US among other major historical events. The crowning jewel of the National Archives is the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights on display in the Rotunda.

With the day coming to an end we return to the brewery for some dinner and a few beers. Tomorrow we are driving out to Mill Run Pennsylvania to take the in depth tour of Frank Wright’s Fallingwater.

Day 20 was our last day in the windy city, and with so much left to do it was hard to have to cut so much out of my stay. We started the day with a walking tour of the modernist architecture in downtown Chicago. The city features a large number of buildings designed by, or influenced by, Mies van der Rohe.

The tour shows how after WW2, when the US Government wanted to modernise it’s offices and public spaces, Mies van der Rohe  designed a number of office buildings and complexes and paved influenced a large number of Modernist building to be built in the downtown. Eventually the architectural style shifted to postmodernism, anachronistically applying the old styles of Chicago school and classical skyscrapers with elements of the modernist building. Eventually this changed again with a swing back to new-modernerism which takes the modernist approach and applies a level of humanism and contextual awareness to the architecture.

To put that another way, buildings are being designed to flow and acknowledge the land and surrounding buildings rather than simply being monolithic structures planted on a site.

After the tour and a light snack we had a look through the rest of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, where they have a model of the city. The model was made from a combination of technical drawings and specifications of as many buildings that they could get as well as official documentation and lots of photographs.

Designed in Google Sketchup and made using automatic prototyping machines, the model is easily scalable (so they say) and has a high degree of accuracy.

We then walked down to the other end of the city for sightseeing and food reasons. On the way, while walking past the Van Buren street bridge we found more evidence of Transformers 3 being filmed. They had closed the whole bridge off and were redirecting pedestrian traffic away from the bridge.

Dinner and a walk back and that ends our last day in Chicago. We have another early start, with an 8:50 flight to Washington DC where we begin our 4th proper city.