Day 1 - Friday

Welcome to our 2019 holiday blog!

We’re back again, just a fraction over twelve months since we were last in the US. This time, we’ve been rather fortuitous and are “cat sitting” for two weeks in New York. Our friend Smiti needs to travel to the UK and she kindly accepted our offer to stay at her apartment and look after her cat Simon whilst she is away.

We’re currently over the mid atlantic as I get started with this blog. This morning was planned pretty much to the minute. We made our way to the airport without any problems. We had to get the train at 8am from the village. We did the usual drop Kathryn and bags off at the station, drive the car back to the house and then I walked up. It was a horrible and rainy morning. Getting wet feet was unavoidable.

In keeping with Northern Rail’s usual service, the train we were getting was cancelled. But the rush hours trains are every 15 minutes, and therefore we got the next one. Thankfully it was a Friday, during a half term week, and so it wasn’t too busy.

Commuter train into Leeds

At Leeds, I popped out of the station briefly to get some coffees and breakfast snacks from Laynes Espresso. We had a brief wait in the waiting room before our train to the airport arrived. We sat at the front in the quiet area and had a nice journey over.

Laynes coffee shop in Leeds

Leeds Station

View from train over to Manchester

Going through the airport was uneventful. There was a quick change of socks to get my feet dry, and straight through security. We actually arrived at about 11am, and our flight was at 12:30pm. There was only about an hour before we were boarding. We got some duty free shopping and magazines for the flight. I re-filled our water bottle and we were on the plane following a short walk down the new Terminal 2 gates at Manchester Airport.

Our plane to America

Boarding the plane

The flight has been good so far, just 4 hours to go now. Weather looks to be good when we arrived. Hopefully we have another uneventful transfer. We are getting the subway from JFK to Fulton St where Smiti lives. It’s going to be rush our so might be quite busy. We’ve done the reverse journey a couple of times so it should be ok. Last time we get the NJ transit train which was probably a bit quicker and quiter, but that only goes to Penn Station which is quite far from Smiti’s.

Taking off over Manchester

Food on the plane

**Update

The landing was good, very steady, and actually the plane didn’t have to wait long for the gate to be free. We went into the immigration hall, it was pretty busy. We had to wait about 30 minutes to get to the front of the line. We actually had a nice immigration officer this time, who noticed we were staying for my birthday.

The luggage was off the plane we when get to the carouselle. Therefore we were quickly up to get the airtrain to the subway. It was nice to arrive whilst the sun was still up, although it was setting fast.

View from AirTrain to the subway

Another view from the AirTrain

As usual, we had a bit of trouble getting the tickets for the subway. I didn’t buy the wrong ticket this time, but it took us a while to actually pay for them. It took a while to get to the platform as we needed to get a lift three floors down. It was pretty busy and some people who looked like they had finished work and on their way homes, were pushing to the front around the tourists.

We rode the train, before realising that we had actually made a mistake. It wasn’t too bad but would take us a little longer to get to Smiti’s. We were a bit stressed. We needed to get to Smiti’s because she would soon be leaving for her plane to the UK. We had to change at Lexington to get a 6 train down to Smiti’s. It eventually terminated, and we swapped to the express train for the final few stops.

We finally arrived a Smiti’s at about 7:30pm. It was great to see her, although it was brief. She was able to tell us all about how to look after Simon and lots of other useful things. She left about 8pm, we didn’t stay up very long after that.