Bus trip to New York and Washington (28.12.-31.12.2002)
On December 27th, Markus from Germany came to Montréal to visit me. We both arrived in Montréal in the evening and had to get up early the next day, because Frederic, Aurélie, Marcus and I had booked a trip with a Chinese bus company to New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Atlantic City for four days.
Here you can see our ticket from the Chinese company.
After stopping near Albany, the capital of New York State, for the first Chinese meal, we arrived in New York City in the afternoon and did a great boat trip around Manhattan island.
The sun was just going done when we came to the statue of liberty.
Unfortunately our hotel for the night was very far outside New York, so we had to go on the Chinese bus again and leave downtown Manhattan already at 9 o'clock in the evening. The next day, we drove back to Ney York City again and visited the Wall Street.
After that, the Chinese group proceeded to go to the Intrepid Sea and Space Museam, but we decided to separate from the group and take a short taxi ride to central park. A few days before, it had snowed quite a lot, so people were still taking sledges to ride down the small hills in the park and it was a nice atmosphere.
After we met our group again, we headed towards Philadelphia, where we had an incredible 30-minute stay, and the we went on the bus again to Washington D.C.
Here you can see Markus - very small compared to the height of the Lincoln Memorial
The Washington Memorial
In the evening we managed to meet with Philip and Meggy in (yet another) Chinese restaurant, but after that we had to take the bus to the hotel very early, which was again very far outside the city. We discovered that we still had to much energy left, so the evening ended in a severe cushion fight in the hotel.
Notice the bad bruise that Fred already has on his forehead. That was the result of some previous artistical show he wanted to demonstrate to us before.
We spent the last night in Atlantic City, a kind of small Las Vegas on the atlantic coast of the USA. Here there are 13 casinos, but during this time of the year, there seemed to be only old people which were still dreaming of becoming rich in their last days. We were a bit annoyed, as we would have preferred to stay longer in New York or in D.C. rather than wasting time in Atlantic City.
During the bus ride back to Montréal on December 31st, we celebrated the start of the new year at 6pm, when it was exactly midnight in Europe. The other people in the bus were a bit irritated, but we had our fun.
The bottle of whiskey that Fred is holding did not survive longer than two hours. He bought it at a duty-free shop near the Canadian border and then dropped it while descending the bus in Montréal. What a pity! We should have emptied it in the bus!
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