We got up later in the morning today, had breakfast and then tried to fill out the online form for the N.Y. road authority. We had to sort out or Eazy pay tag. The website didn’t accept a foreign credit card so we called them. After getting the run around  for a while, a very patient lady got all our details and linked the tag to our credit card. We also called the insurance company and clarified what we had to get as proof of our previous bike insurance.
We finally left the hotel at 11:15 and took our first wrong turn onto the highway. Bjoern’s excuse was that the GPS is a bit flaky when it comes to short crossings… 10 miles one way and 10 miles back and we were finally riding in the right direction. 🙂

The rest of the trip went well, and we tried to keep the bike on about half throttle. (They’re new bikes, you have to ride them in first)

As we got close we missed the turn-off, this time the detour was much shorter, only around 5 miles.  So we arrived at Stephen and Karens house by a slightly more scenic route.

Whoops! The bikes are a bit big for the door…

We met the whole family and Wombat and Val again. They are still willing to put up with us for the next few days. Bjoern got all his new toys. He felt like a boy at Christmas. The best thing was that the bash plates arrived! Nice! Unfortunately some screws and a small brackets are missing. After catching up for a while, we followed Karen, Sara, Wombat and Val to a shopping centre. We tried to get a 12V soldering iron and a multimeter. That was unsuccessful, but browsing and shopping for other things was fun. We rode back to their place for some dinner ~ Colleen is a great cook! Sigrid called the Palace hotel and we went to use up the night Wombat and Val paid for when we were still in Adelaide. Had a beer and a wine at the bar , then were off to bed for some well deserved rest 🙂

We had a late start to meet our friend Belinda in Brooklyn. We’d not seen her in about 20 years, she is an American friend of our from when we lived in Berlin.
Bjoern used the extra time in the morning to book the car for the journey to Vermont to pick up the bikes.

We took the subway again and had some fun with the diddles along the way 😀

Meeting with Belinda was great, we talked all the time – we had so much to catch up on! Belinda prepared some sort of pancake for us, this way we adhered to the Passover ritual of not to have anything that rises. We also managed to get an extra dose of patting cats – Belinda has two.

Meet one of them – isn’t she cute?

After a very tasty brunch we had a walk through Belinda’s neighbourhood. How beautifully colourful!

This included Toms Diner, the one from the song by Suzan Vegas… dubdidudu dupdidudo dupdo dudup….

At least the diner owner thinks so 😉

Belinda said good bye to us on the subway

And then we went to look at Ground Zero

I thought it was a pretty moving memorial.  And the new towers are going up at the rate of knots!

 

The next few photos are from the walk to the Waldorf Astoria to catch up with Gaby and Matthias – a great place to meet 😉
Again, we had some fun with the Diddles

 

Once there we soaked up the surroundings while having a drink and then took some pictures

We headed back to little Italy, and had a nice meal in a Swiss restaurant.

And then spent some time walking through little Italy

stopping only for essentials, like for tiramisu, coffee and beer at a café.
Finally we went home, tired but happy 😀

Miles:0

Today we had a marvellous breakfast in a corner store at the train station. It looked like a restaurant from a movie. For me it was like paradise. They offered all types of omelettes and you could buy a bottomless cup of coffee (the coffee tasted nice and so did the omelettes!).

We all enjoyed it so much that the start to the city was a bit delayed. Today we thought we’d have a look at the Brooklyn Bridge. To be honest, Mathias came up with the idea, we just followed along :D. So we jumped on the train and nearly got it right.

We picked a train that did actually go to Brooklyn but via a different route. So we decided that we would walk the rest of the way. When we went through the streets, we saw plenty of Jewish people burning something in big piles, there where fires all over the place. I saw some bread and a toaster in one pile.

Belinda explained it to us later that this is part of the Passover celebration; all yiddish people shouldn’t eat any food that rises (that is, containing yeast) in their house, so it was all burned. We thought it was all really interesting:

 

After some detours we arrived at the famous restaurant on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge, but before we entered the restaurant we queued to get some freshly made ice-cream from a shop in an ex-fireboat house. The ice-cream and the view at this place were great.

This is the ice-cream store and Bjorn realised that the skyline was mirrored in the door. Nice shot! 😀

After we finished the ice-cream we went into the River Café restaurant,

Gabi and Mathias ordered two glasses of wine and I ordered two glasses of Champagne. Uhm.. As we are in New York and they call it sparkling wine, that turned out to be a rather expensive mistake… :/
Nevertheless, it tasted nice!

 

After a nice rest we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge.

It is impressive how people could manage to build something like this in the early 1900.

From there we walked across to the Hudson Rivers river front and found a curious sculpture area.

It looked like some topics were related to money, but we couldn’t figure out what it was all about. Regardless, the sculptures looked interesting.

We kept walking,

but by Peer 40 we started to feel our legs and we went into the city to have some dinner. Found a cosy Pizzeria had some salad, pizzas and wine and went home after.

 

The next day started simular,

Breakfast at the corner shop at the train station. After that Gabi and Mathias went to the city, Sigrid and I stayed home to organize some things needed for picking up the bike (and writing a blog).

In the afternoon we meet with Gabi and Mathis at the Apple store.

We had a short look and went out again; Gabi bought a protection for here iPhone, but the prices for the ipad2 were the same as everywhere else.

In a nearby building we stumbled across a bike for Bjoern!

Then we walked to the Rockefeller building, which was beautifully decorated

And more specifically, it was also decorated for easter 🙂

So up we went

Some pictures from above

Still more sightseeing , this is Grand Central Station

Gaby and Mattias had enough for the day – we motored on to the Empire State Building

The views from there are even more impressive! Sorry to say , even the Diddles agree, the Empire State Building beats the Rockefeller Centre for views over the city J

The lift there is a well-kept relic of the past.  Loved it!

On the way home we took the subway and were very surprised to find it not as deserted as expected. We had a nice ride home and arrived at abut 3am on Sunday morning, Happy Easter!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Date: 04-05 April

Karin (Stephens’s wife) and her daughter Sara dropped us off at the New Yorker hotel. The traffic was frantic and I was happy that I didn’t have to drive on the first day. I was impressed how Karin managed the car around the busses and trucks. It reminded me a bit of the traffic in Delhi.

When we arrived in the Hotel, our friends from Germany, Gabi and Mathias were already there. We had a short walk in the neighbourhood and had a burger in one of the small shops. The surroundings looked like stage being prepared. I guess watching American movies does /that/ to you 🙂.
The view from our window is quite nice.

The next day we had a invitation to visit the New Yorker Stock exchange. Gabi did her magic and organized it. She originaly tried it from Berlin, but all she got was ‘No visitors after 911’. Then one night she watched TV and saw Manuel Koch reporting on the current stock exchange movements. She emailed Manuel and he was nice enough to organise a tour for us. We were really impressed. Having said that, we had to follow a dress code. This meant buying a new shirt, tie and trousers for me, since we forgot to pack them. Sigrid found a shop called ‘Century 21’ which opened early enough for us and it was described as the insider tip for value for money clothing. So I got my Christmas presents earlyJ.

After the stock exchange we hopped onto the free Staten Island Ferry which was passing the Statue Of Liberty. The Statue is currently under renovation so we couldn’t get onto it, so passing with the ferry was the closest that we got to go.

In the evening we paid Times Square a visit. On the way to the square we discovered an M&M store, it was really fun to stroll through. We were amazed what M&M merchandise are available, from soft toys, to fridge magnets, T-Shirts ……

I know the blog updates are a bit slow at the moment, but it is hard work to spend the whole day strolling through New York. In the evening we can’t write the blog.. no we have to sit in a pub and review the day over a beer or two.

Hopefully the updates will be quicker as soon we pick up the bikes ~ which should be the 10th of April 😀

 

 

In the previous blog I forgot to add some of the pictures from our flight. Flight map, Wombat and the Diddles in Dubai Airport, here they are.

We arrived in New York and went through immigration without any problems; even though we only had a one way ticket.

Stephen – Val’s Cousin – picked us up from the airport and brought us to his house, where we celebrated our arrival with some cold beer.

Spring just started here and the weather was perfect. After 42 hours of traveling, 31 hours of flights, 3 breakfasts, 3 dinners and multiple other small feasts, our body clock was out of whack, and everything felt a bit like a dream. Slowly reality settled in “We are in New York“, after 3 years of planning our journey has started.

Leaving on a jet plane

On Sunday morning we rode back to Adelaide, and got lucky again with the weather. I got used to Simons bike and I started to enjoy riding a cruiser (don’t tell Simon!) [edit: too late, he’s editing your blog]
We took our travel laptop with us to the AGM and we noticed that there were still some files and tools missing. So as soon we arrived at home, I started to move the desktop and monitors out of the shed back into Ft. Knox. For some reason Sigrid wasn’t happy ……

And our new SD Video camera was there, I ordered it on the weekend before we left to the AGM, and was hoping that it would arrive before Monday morning. Luckily it arrived on Friday, and we could take it along!

In the evening we met with the family and went out for dinner. Sigrid enjoyed holding Silas for a while; I gave her most of my holding time share J

Back from dinner, we started to pack the last bag with riding gear and my suit. Gabi, our friend from Berlin, will meet us in New York and we’ll spend Easter together. She organized a possible visit at the New York stock exchange, so we had to bring some semi-formal outfit. Apparently motorbike boots and bike jackets don’t cut it. We were thinking of renting the formal clothes for a day in New York, since we wouldn’t have the space in the our motorbike luggage for the formal wear. Gabi came up with a better solution, she would take the formal wear back to Berlin and we pick it up in June next year and take it home from there. So we repacked everything until 3AM. When we moved the last parts into the sched we discovered 2 soft toys that we brought from Berlin, a male and female Diddle. We thought they should us accompany during our travel. Brian and Val had a similar idea; Val organized a wombat to travel with them

Next morning as we were getting ready to go to the airport, I got a surprise when I tried to finalize some account setup with our banks. I know, that /probably/ should have been done earlier – but …….. We needed to call the banks to solve the problem, which gave us just enough time get to the airport, check the luggage in and then jump onto the plane. Our whole family brought us to the airport – I guess they just wanted to make sure that we were really leaving J.

The flight went without problems, Adelaide – Melbourne – Singapore – Dubai- New York. We couldn’t use the spot to update our blog, since the layover was too short to leave the airport and get outside – which would have been needed for acquiring the GPS position. Placing the spot on a window wasn’t enough, so our map will only show Adelaide and then New York. Short note about Emirates Airline: the seating, entertainment and food was excellent, so we hardly noticed the 28 hours sitting in airplanes.