New York: The big āporo

Ok, so this is going to be a long one, because while we were only in NYC for five nights, we packed a lot in, and loved the joint so have to share all the details. We haven't even ranted about the bagels or the service! You ready?
We've split this into areas of the City for ease of reading.

Lou and the famous bull near Wall St

Walking the highline on a magnificent day

Take me out to the ball game

First up, Midtown.
Since our accommodation (Candlewood Suites) was located in mid town, just near Times Square, we spent the bulk of our time in this area. We spent the better part of one day walking around visiting Times Square (didn’t find the free museum and nice clean loos until our final day), the Empire State building, the Chrysler building, Public Library, St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Rockerfeller Centre, FAO Schwarz (yep we jumped around on the big piano), Grand Central Station, and an excellent tour of the UN.
We also popped into Justin Timberlake's restaurant Southern Hospitality in Hell's kitchen and stuffed ourselves silly.

Top tip: When you get to the Empire State building there’s a huge queue of people wanting to head to the observation deck and touts selling tickets to queue jump. From the 5th Ave entrance, it looks like you can’t get in without a ticket. You can though – just walk around the corner to 33rd St and use one of those entrances to have a good look around the lobby. Of course if you want the view, you'll have to queue!

The view from the top of the Met, central park

Uptown

Plenty to do and see here, and a really different feel to the rest of the city (might be all that money rolling around?) We spent a fab afternoon mooching around Central Park and having a wee nap in the sunshine before heading to the excellent

Metropolitan Museum and taking in the American wing and the view from the roof top bar, before wandering home past Park Ave.

Top tip: the price at museums (usually around $20-25) is in fact the ‘recommended’ price. You can just pay what you want – but you do have to pay something. At the ticket desk, just say you’d like to pay $10 or whatever, and that’s just fine - no snooty looks or anything!

Downtown

Downtown also has plenty to offer, including Wall Street, Southport (great for a drink in the sunshine), China Town, Little Italy (where we had the biggest pizza ever at Lombardi's), and the excellent 'Highline' walk along a disused rail track, which now provides a spot of green in the city and great views.

Around town

Brooklyn

The old girl

One of Lou’s old school friends lives in Brooklyn, so we walked across the bridge one evening to take in views of the city and the Statue of Liberty to have a meal in Brooklyn. As well as seeing a different part of New York, we enjoyed a fantastic meal at a local Mexican, Fonda, with Simone and her husband Geoff.

Top tip: None of the guide books told us how to get onto the bridge, so we had to ask a friendly Policewoman. The pedestrian entrance is right by City Hall.

Ellis Island/Statue of Liberty

We like to think we don’t act like travelling rookies so much these days, but we were the day we decided to get a boat to Ellis Island to visit the Immigration Museum. After 40 minutes in the queue to buy tickets, we did a reccie to see how long the queue through security and to the boat was. We estimated 1000+ people and an hour and a half, so we called that idea quits. Instead, we booked online that night (no extra charge) which meant no queues. In fact, we booked for a 10am sailing and at that time of the day there wasn’t much of a queue at all, so if you don’t want to book online, get there around 9am to minimise time wasted.

Lou rockin' a peace keeper's helmet at the UN

Times Square at night

The boat cruise was great, got up really close to the Statue of Liberty, but we didn’t get off on the island (you can, but there’s not much to see). Instead we continued on to Ellis Island where we spent 3 hours exploring the immigration museum and learning about what immigrants to the US used to go through. Interestingly, the questions they were asked (can you support yourself, can you work, are you a criminal) are much the same as UK immigration ask Dean each time he renews his visa, so things haven’t really changed. Also interesting was that the US really welcomed immigrants from 1892-24, so only 2 percent of those coming into Ellis Island got sent back. They have an excellent search facility so we looked up Yarralls and von Ds to see if any of them had come through, and since found out Lou's Great Grandfather went through there in the 1920s from Scotland.

Yankee Stadium

Whoop, it was free t-shirt day when we visited the Yankees. We do like free stuff! Enjoyed the game and atmosphere, and gorged on the obligatory fried foods, beer and crackerjack.

Some more tips to get the most from your stay

Getting into town from JFK: Very easy and fast on public transport. Take the air train (don’t need a ticket just yet) to Jamaica. Before exiting, purchase a combined airtrain/LIRR ticket (around $13) and exit. Get on the LIRR to Penn Station and you’re there in about 20 minutes.

Metro tickets: If you’re there for 3 or more days, it’s probably worth buying a 3 day pass. We didn’t, and even though we spent most of our time walking, we used the metro enough to warrant it. If you don’t get a pass, you can just buy one metro card and pass it through to the person you’re with – you don’t need one each like you do in London.

Tipping: a good rule of thumb is to just double the tax added to your bill (around 8%) which gives a 16% tip.

Most department stores (and certainly Macy's where we took advantage) have visitor cards, offering a 10% discount for out of towners.

Take your passport, as the kiwi driver's licence might not cut it as ID for alcohol. Dean and our friend Rod spent about 20 minutes arguing with various members of staff at the Yankees who wouldn't accept their NZ drivers' licences as proof of age. They won and we got the beer in the end, but save yourself the trouble!

And to finish, here's the locals at the 9th Ave food festival on while we were there, awesome.

Viva Las Vegas

We popped into Vegas for a few nights on our way back from NZ and were pleased to find it’s just like Disney Land, only for grown ups. We hadn’t realised quite how long the strip is (almost 7kms), so were stoked our hotel (Caesar’s Palace) was smack bang in the middle of all the action. Our first night we took in the sights and sounds of the strip itself – the fountain at the Bellagio (which is not a fountain, it’s a 9 acre lake), the first of three visits there; the erupting volcano at the Mirage; and the pirate show outside Treasure Island with scantily clad pirates, pyrotechnics and all. Great fun. Enjoyed an American BBQ meal at Gilleys, then wandered back down the strip were we happened across the Piano bar at Harrahs where for free, we enjoyed a couple of hours of Duelling Pianos (cute blonde twins playing popular songs, teasing each other and encouraging crowd singalongs and requests, just the ticket).

Here's the 'fountain' outside the Bellagio in action:

Day two was spent wandering the strip in full and doing a spot of gambling here and there, after feeding ourselves silly at the Bellagio buffet. The hotels and casinos are just amazing, so we happily wandered for hours taking in the amounts of money spent in hotels like New York New York, Luxor, MGM Grand (what's with live lions inside a hotel?),Paris and the Flamingo. At the MGM we took part in a TV show pilot viewing which was a bit of fun, so we’ll keenly keep our eyes out for the programme we viewed to hit the screens and see if our feedback made any difference.

Day three was a tour of the Grand Canyon. We had pre-arranged our hotel pick up for 6am with the tour company and happily gone to bed the night before with our alarm set for 5.40am (doesn’t take long for us to get pretty in the morning). So we were pretty miffed to be called at 4.30am by the tour company confirming our pick up. Needless to say we didn’t get back to sleep and were pretty grumpy tourists by the time the bus showed up. The tour itself was pretty good, but long. We bussed to the West Rim of the canyon, stopping quickly for a photo op at the Hoover Dam. At the canyon we took a quick helicopter ride to the canyon floor, followed by a boat trip, then ‘coptered out. Were a bit disappointed that the helicopter wasn’t a bit longer to show us more of the canyon, it was simply there as a mode of transport to get in and out. We then had a couple of hours to take in the canyon from the top. Pretty amazing you can get right up to the side, can’t be strict health and safety laws in the USA. Amazingly only about 1 person each year falls off the side. Wasn’t us this time round thank goodness, despite getting pretty close to the edge.

Friday was our last day in Vegas, so we ventured to the ‘original strip’, Fremont Street. It’s a much less glitzy side of Vegas despite all the neon, but we enjoyed some cheaper gambling and the atmosphere. Our final night was spent at dinner and a show – we opted for a Brazillian bbq place (Dean does love his meat), and the Crazy Horse Paris burlesque show – mostly because it was half price that night (Dean does love saving the pennies).

And that was that. Farewell Las Vegas, we’d happily come back!

Los Angeles - Downtown

We were stoked to find how flash our hotel in downtown LA was. A good choice was made.

We made full use of the gym and the pool after all the food we’d eaten at Disneyland.

On Saturday we went on a bus tour of LA which we highly recommend. It is such a huge city that without a tour we wouldn’t have known where to go, or seen half of what we did. Highlights include Venice Beach, Beverly Hills and Hollywood. We saw various buildings used in movies (eg the Daily Planet and a few action blockbusters) and a number of locations used in Pretty Woman which Lou enjoyed. We were a bit disappointed not to see any stars’ homes, but got a good feel for the city and learnt some interesting trivia.

We’d booked tickets to a basketball game before leaving NZ so had a great time watching the LA Clippers v Portland Trailblazers that night (the Lakers were playing the next night but were way more expensive!). The stadium was huge and the entertainment amazing * cheerleaders, kids dance squads and the spirit crew (guys and girls, like off the cheerleading movies).The home team lost the game but it was really fun to be part of it. We reckon that if you are going to a game, try and go to one where the crowd will be closer to sold out than 1/2 full, would really add a lot to the experience.

Sunday it was back on a plane and onto London. After such amazing hot weather we were a little shocked to arrive to snow!!! Dean foolishly decided to arrive in shorts and a tee-shirt, but we survived.

Los Angeles - Part 1 - Disneyland

On the way to the UK we stopped into Los Angeles for a short break and a chance for us to do some of the things we had always dreamed about. Lou was pretty keen on doing Disneyland so 'Happiest Place on Earth' entertained the von Yarralls for 2 days.

Without a doubt, Disneyland is a well organised place, with some of the friendliest staff you could find. In the week before Easter we thought we would escape most of the queues. Hmm, not really, one day saw a crowd of 58,000 go through the gates out of a total capacity of 68,000.

All in all the park is really well laid out and the queuing is done efficiently, and you don't really mind waiting too long. What was disappointing was the large number of "obese" yanks on their mobility scooters who bypassed the queue, with their large family in tow, only to spring out of the scooter into the ride. If only I had no morals, I would have hired a scooter in a flash :)

It is a pretty amazing place, with lots of nice touches. The fireworks at 9pm each night are cool, with the music taking you through some of the more famous rides around that park, and then a suspended Tinkerbell comes across the top of the massive crowds.

Adjacent to Disneyland is the California Adventure Park, run by Disney but with a California theme. The rides are slightly more adventurous, but still have the familiar Disney efficient queues. Nowhere near as crowded as Disneyland, but still some rides saw queues of up to an hour.

Disneyland hint and tips:
FastPass is an absolute must. Keeps your sanity by avoiding most of the queues on the big rides.

On the strong NZ dollar, eating isn't as bad as you might expect, and the portions are typically generous so don't worry too much unless you are looking for a healthy option.

If possible try and get 2 days at the park. We got 1 and 1/2 days which was pretty much spot on, did all the major rides once, and got in a couple of double rides.

Independent world travel

Hi There

This blog is about Dean and Lou Yarrall's travels. We used to reside in Wellington, New Zealand, but moved to London, United Kingdom in April 2008.
We travel a lot, mostly independently, and often on a budget. Hopefully this blog is a useful resource for anyone wanting to travel to the places we've been. Feel free to get in touch for more tips if we can be useful.

Dean and Lou