After a late night last night at the comedy club, we were out late this morning, but planned to pack in as much as possible, with the first stop being the up to that point unseen Statue of Liberty. We figured that as it was the day before Thanksgiving, the queues wouldn’t be bad. How wrong we were! When we arrived down at Battery Park, the queue for tickets stretched out and curved back on itself for what looked like half a mile. On top of that, there was a further queue once tickets were bought to actually get on the Liberty Island ferry. Given it was later in the day, we decided we didn’t want to spend ages queueing, so instead just took photos from the harbour. Bit of a hazy day, but better things to do than spend several hours in queues.

We left Battery Park to head up the road to the World Financial Center. Chris wanted to see Ground Zero - not something I wanted to see myself - I find it hard to get to grips with the fact that a place where 3000+ people died, and what is nothing more than a construction site currently, has become a tourist attraction. I find it in very bad taste. We skirted around the site, and continued up the hill to the other parts of the Financial District, passing close to, but not directly by, Wall Street.

After getting something to eat, we took a wrong turning on Fulton, and found ourselves on Pier 16 at South Street Seaport, overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and several old clipper ships. It was still hazy, but a nice wrong turn to make, nevertheless!

When we finally found our way back on track and got to a subway station, we rode back uptown to find the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink. Chris had mentioned that there was a statue of Prometheus that overlooked the ice rink, and that the Christmas tree should be up. The plans for going to the Top of the Rock were shelved because of the haziness - visibility wouldn’t be good enough to make it worthwhile. We did get slightly confused in the Rockefeller Center when we couldn’t find the way out of the building to the ice rink, but finally made it. The Christmas tree is up, but hasn’t been decorated yet save for the star on top of it. Unfortunately, we’re going to miss the lighting of it, which doesn’t take place until next week.

We decided that the hours of walking around central Manhattan were taking a real toll on our poor abused feet - every time we sat down for any appreciable length of time and stood up again, we felt like our joints were seizing up. To save our discomfort (and wussiness) we headed back home and got a takeaway from a local Thai place.

Tomorrow - Thanksgiving and the Macy’s Parade.