Not too early a start today, we all got up at about 9.30am, had some breakfast and got ready to meet Mike. He arrived at about 10.30am and we were all ready to go. He brought us into the White Plains train station where we would catch a train into Grand Central in New York City. We also met the rest of the New Yorkers and the Hungarian contingent at the train station. The journey did not take very long, only about 45 minutes and then we got to see the main sites of Grand Central station, with many references to Madagascar of course!
During the day we visited many sites of the city including Mc Donalds, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Nintendo Store, and the Rockerfeller Centre. The Empire State Building was truly amazing, as we waited in line there were presentation boards outlining how recent changes across the whole building have made it significantly more energy efficient, and in fact a beacon of energy efficiency. I found this very interesting and most of the guys read the boards as well. The wait wasn’t that long, only about an hour and we were in the elevator to the 80th floor. This floor had presentations on the history of the building and how it is important for many reasons, not just its height. Then another short elevator ride to the 86th floor, this floor had an outdoor observation area where spent quite a while, at half an hour or 45 minutes. We took lots of photos and looked down on all of the sites New York City.
After that was Times Square which was interesting but also very busy. WE split into smaller group here, but most groups visited the same places, the MandM store, the Hershey’s store and Toys ‘R Us. These were all good to see and certainly an experience for those who have never visited Times Square before. Next we wet on a bit of a walking tour and saw some other sites on our way back to Grand Central station.
By the time we got back to the cabin it was quite late and everyone was very tired, so we all went to bed very quickly after a thoroughy interesting and enjoyable day.
