Category: United States

I quite like hotels, but the recent trend in many countries, including the UK, Ireland and the United States, is that prices have been soaring. I’m not entirely sure why, I suspect it’s pent up demand. There’s another factor perhaps in play that hotels seem willing to leave lots of empty rooms, some are no longer going for occupancy rates, they’re looking for total revenue and that’s a different equation.

Anyway, what with the exchange rate soaring, I’m having to be more creative on this trip and am switching to Airbnb more where hotels are too expensive, particularly in the first week. I’ve done this on trips away before in little groups, but never on my own as it seems like too much hassle. But, some of these Airbnb arrangements are becoming like small hotels, and that means that the experience isn’t much different. It’s hardly going to be the Sofitel in Warsaw, but we can’t have everything.

Right, I’ve digressed, my choice of Airbnb location meant I had to find the bus that would take me out of the airport, which is already a cost saving compared to the AirTrain. After some faffing about in a lift and several quiet complaints about the poor signage, I found the bus stop.

And talking of which, there’s the AirTrain on the upper level.

I’m pleased that since my last trip to New York that there is a new public transport payment system which is called OMNY. In effect, it’s like TFL and allows passengers to use their contactless cards, which works for me. It’s been installed on all buses and at all Metro stations in New York and I was excited to see how it worked. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it was broken on this bus and the driver let me on free. It’s a good system though, it will automatically cap fares at $33 for the week (starting Monday, which was handy as that’s when I arrived) so I’ll hit that relatively quickly and then get transport free until I leave on Friday.

After going a few stops on the bus, I thought I’d walk to the Airbnb since it was only twenty minutes.

Passing by Springfield Park, created in 1932, with the area given that name by seventeenth century settlers who noted that there were lots of springs in the area. Creative naming. Fun fact incidentally, the area of New York known as Queens, where I was staying, was named after Catherine of Braganza who was the wife of King Charles II.

It’s not very evident from the photo, but the wind picked up and dust went everything, it also got cold very quickly which I liked.

The dust is sort of visible in the rear of this photo. Use your imagination…..

It was evident, from some subtle clues, that the accommodation was near to the airport.

Little kittens came to welcome me. You don’t get that at Accor.

The room which was spotlessly clean and the host was lovely, pro-actively turning the air conditioning on full which is just as I like it. She seemed aghast that not every house in the UK has air conditioning and I can’t blame her. The welcome offered was better than at most hotels that I’ve visited, I was suitably impressed.

Free snacks were available, I went for an orange (I think I had jet lag and was confused) and nuts, along with a rather lovely coffee. For the price, this worked very well for me and was a positive first use of Airbnb. It cost just over £55, but hotels even further out were around £90 and anything in New York was realistically £300. I slept very well, it was delightful to catch up on sleep after the meandering way I had taken to get here.

Still on UK time, I got up at 06:00 and let to head to central New York at 06:45, just as it got light. I sent a message to the lovely host that I had left the key in the appropriate place and was good to go.

It’s been a long time since I’ve visited the United States and since then my phone contract allows me to roam which makes things like seeing where buses actually are has become much easier. The bus turned up just as Google promised at the stop it said that it would. What a time to be alive…. Travel is made so much easier with Google, I can’t begin to imagine the horrors of using paper maps. I got to try my contactless card on the screen of the bus (the one by the door, I didn’t put my card on the windscreen) and it worked, my first of many trips this week.

I was lucky to board when I did as I got a seat and the bus was completely packed by the time it arrived at Jamaica Metro station. The school kids on the bus looked exhausted, but it looked like they were facing a 40 minute bus journey each way, and then perhaps more, and it was certainly an early start.

There has been a station around here since 1836 although it has been rebuilt since then, not least as it deals with enormous numbers of passengers every day, not far off 250,000, which is more than railway stations such as London Liverpool Street which is around 180,000 people on average per day. I got fortunate here as I wasn’t rushing (as can be noted by the fact I took time to take a photo) to get the E train into central New York, but I noted it looked packed. There was then an announcement that the train on the other platform, where I was standing, would be leaving first and the stampede was like a thing of natural beauty. I was fortunate as I was near that train and had already darted in to get a seat on what would be another very busy journey. Comfortable and cheap transit, it was good to be back in New York.

As my Metro train stopped off relatively near to Hudson Yards, I thought I’d go and look at the huge development that they were building there as I’ve heard so much about it. It won’t be completed for another couple more years, but they’ve finished a fair chunk of the structures, although more of which in the next post….

This rather exciting piece of architecture is Vessel and is part of the artworks at Hudson Yards. It was designed by the British architect Thomas Heatherwick, who also designed the ill-fated Garden Bridge project in London. Not to be done with that, he designed the 2012 Olympic Cauldron and the new Routemaster bus, so something of a modern day George Stephenson.

In all of this are 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps and 80 separate landings, so some considerable opportunity for exploration is possible. The cost though was ridiculous, at $200 million, and there’s no way that a sum of money that large should have been spent on an art project. That would have been enough to endow an art museum, despite the excitement of pretending you’re in a honeycomb. Although to be fair, I doubt they would have started off on the project if they had realised the cost, it was originally meant to be much cheaper.

Unfortunately, it can’t be climbed at the moment, due to a series of suicides meaning that they’re putting nets in and adding some other safety features. It must be sad for a designer to see their project become a suicide hotspot, but at least there are efforts to re-open it. It was free to climb initially, but the cost of safety improvements means that there is now (or will be again when it re-opens) a $10 fee other than for those arriving in the first hour of opening and they can have a walk around free of charge.

Looking out over the Hudson River, those aren’t roofs in the foreground, they’re trains parked up and it’s part of the High Line behind them. More of that later in the week.

Looking out from the shopping centre, there was some controversy for a long time at the lack of disabled access at Vessel, although they’ve made some changes to improve that as well. As if all of that wasn’t enough controversy, they also got into a mess with their photo policy, but more about that at https://ny.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18275790/hudson-yards-vessel-photo-policy-social-media. It looks good though, I have to give them that and perhaps I’ll get to have a bit of a walk about on it one day.

Not a particularly in-depth blog post this, I just liked the name, as did someone called Dylan that I know ? They don’t seem to sell much branded stuff, it’s just an emporium of sweets, which is something I think the Dylan that I know would think was quite marvellous. This is their grand outlet at the Hudson Yards shopping centre, a rather upmarket boutique type of place.