New York, New York... Arriving in the Big Apple

According to Douglas Adams’ cult classic, “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” (a 1979 novel that began as a BBC radio series in 1978), the meaning of life, the universe and everything is 42. So with this in mind, last Sunday morning at the age of 42, I set out on my very first solo overseas trip.

Travelling is something I love to do but the thought of travelling to the other side of the world all by myself was daunting, to put it mildly. Naturally, I imagined numerous catastrophic scenarios… that (so far) have never happened.

The fourteen and a half hour flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles on board a Qantas A380 went smoothly, I ate every skerrick of aeroplane food put before me (my former resolve to begin a “Look like a Supermodel for New York” diet all but abandoned) and watched movies, Les Miserables and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained… followed by a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

At Los Angeles, I cleared customs with only Vegemite and Tim Tams to declare and boarded another Qantas flight to New York, touching down about five and a half hours later.

Catching a cab from the airport, my friendly and very helpful driver was a former college mathematics teacher who’d arrived from Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. He saw me safely to my accommodation on 105^th Street, East Harlem and didn’t leave until Maggie, who I was staying with, had opened her door and welcomed me inside.

Maggie and her husband, Sergio rent an apartment less than a minute’s walk from 5^th Avenue and the iconic Central Park on Manhattan Island, New York City. I was staying with them through a website called airbnb.com, where people are able to rent out their spare bedroom to travellers. A concept that suited me down to the ground; staying all by myself in a lonely hotel room in a foreign country, is not my idea of fun.

Central Park

My first day in New York started with Sergio giving me instructions on how to catch the subway, a bank to go to, to get my cash passport card working and advice on which sim card to get for my mobile phone.

By the afternoon I had walked through Central Park, had some American dollars in my wallet, my phone was working, I’d eaten a bagel for lunch and had successfully caught the subway.

I went on to do a double-decker bus tour of downtown Manhattan and journeyed to the 70^th floor observation deck of the G.E. Building, known as the Top of the Rock. Built in 1933, it forms part of the Rockefeller Centre and affords spectacular 360° views of the city and across to the Empire State Building.

Founded in the 1600s and now with a population in excess of eight million, the big apple is an impressive place… 

The view from the Top of the Rock