USA Travel Blog 2 - Travel
Very few things in this life are more inevitable than the fact that if you’re somewhere and you want to be somewhere else you have to travel. In the past I’ve travelled to and around various parts of America via myriad means including big planes, small planes, overground trains, underground trains, trams, buses, big cars, small cars and, the first time I went, pushchairs.
We left from Heathrow on a warm Saturday morning aboard a nice Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340-600 called Lady Luck (G-VWIN). I watched three films on the flight, all of which were excellent. We arrived at Newark on a hot Saturday evening and boarded my sister’s Jeep, a first-generation Liberty, to drive to Red Bank, NJ, our home for the following 9 nights.
On Wednesday, having spent the weekend and first part of the week using the Jeep, we hired a 2010 Hyundai Accent which had neither central locking nor electric windows…but it did have satellite radio. I tuned this to BBC Radio 1 for a few minutes, for novelty value, and quickly realised why I stopped listening to it in the first place. ‘Who is this twat?’ mum asked of a young Welsh fellow who seemed to think that ‘gregorious’ was a word meaning sociable. ‘No idea’ I replied rapidly reaching for the knob and retuning to a classic rock station as such egregious miseducation was too much to bear. You can’t go wrong with classic rock. We used the car mainly to go shopping and to find the Twin Lights of Navesink. We returned it on Friday.
On the Monday afternoon we caught an NJ Transit train from Red Bank into New York Penn Station and once there we grabbed a cab from the rank outside Madison Square Garden to take us to our hotel. We used a similar journey in reverse, as well as the Newark AirTrain monorail, to get to the airport on the Wednesday.
Sadly we didn’t take the Metro while we were there. I’ve done it before and it’s always fun. It’s kinda like the Tube but hotter and with an increased risk of death. Maybe.
Whilst in New York our primary method of transport was foot. In fact I was proud of the fact that we didn’t resort to motorised transport once, apart from the train station to and fro. Granted we didn’t actually go all that far from our hotel - with a hotel located by Radio City Music Hall you really don’t need to if you’re only there for a day or two - but still we covered a fair few miles on those poor feet of ours.
An Airbus A340-600, this time called Scarlet Lady (G-VRED), brought us back to Heathrow in good time and without incident. I only watched one film but it was an enjoyable one.
And that really concludes the transport section of my US vacation. I hope it has whet your appetite for what’s to come. More?
