Monday 1st September – Tuesday 2nd September
New York, USA
Skate dancing, Central Park
Our first afternoon in New York. The best cure for jet lag? Sunshine: we’d better persuade our bodies that it’s not nighttime, even if it really should be.
Luckily, it was a beautiful sunny day and New York was celebrating Labor Day, a national holiday. And the Central Park Dance Skaters Association were making the best of it! DJ Bobby Morales was in charge of the makeshift DJ booth. A wide mix of people (with and without skates) were dancing along, from ‘too cool for school’ through to ‘dance like no-one’s watching’!
This was New York at its most relaxed – just cutting loose and enjoying the end of the summer.
Star gazing, the High Line
Back in 1999, an NYC community group formed to save a derelict elevated railway line from demolition, and in 2011 it opened as a fantastic park, 30 feet above the ground, called The High Line.
It forms a fantastic green corridor which is amazingly well-maintained and obviously popular with both tourists and locals. Clearly, it is also doing wonders for regeneration of the area, too, if the number of signs advertising rental properties with Highline views is anything to go by.
We visited in daylight on Tuesday, and then went back in the evening (after a delicious vegetarian Japanese meal at Chelsea Market) to attend a weekly event, which involved a local amateur astronomy group bringing their telescopes along and giving members of the public the opportunity to do some stargazing in the city.
(I should mention that the title of this post owes something to poetic licence as we actually saw planets – Mars and Saturn – plus the moon, rather than any stars!)
Song of the day
This song – ‘Rather Be’ by Clean Bandit – was already our song of the summer in the UK. If 92.3 AMP Radio is anything to go by, it’s one of the songs of the summer here too.
Striking Out 