The Red Bus tour

As a wedding present, our good friends Lou and Steve gave us tickets for the Red Bus tour around New York, so Kristy and I decided to engage tourist mode and cash in the tickets over the weekend. The tour takes you round many parts of the city in multiple stages, or “loops”. The idea is you can get on and off any loop as often as you want, for however long your ticket is valid.

Having not been to Brooklyn yet, we decided to take that tour first. There’s not quite as much action in Brooklyn as what there is in Manhattan, but it was interesting to hear about its history and how it demised after joining Manhattan (and the other boroughs) to become New York City. The tour dropped us in Little Italy, where we had some chow, then jumped on the Downtown loop to finish the afternoon. We had already seen a lot of the downtown sites, but learning the history from a local was way cool.

We finished up in Times Square (my first visit), where after a while of wondering around aimlessly in awe of the lights, we ate some dinner and jumped on the night-time “holiday lights” tour. Unfortunately it was not all it was cracked up to be, and basically just served to get us home both late and cold.

Our last red bus tour was for the uptown loop. This was probably the best one for us, as almost everything we saw was new. We started off on the top story of the bus, but after about 1/2 an hour we were so cold that we were afraid we would never ever be warm again. So we jumped off the bus at The Cathedral of St John the Divine and had a walk around.

The cathedral is huge – the largest in the world, no less. The Statue of Liberty could fit inside, and it wouldn’t touch the roof. It’s longer than 2 football fields, end-to-end. To give you a better idea of the magnitude of this thing – check out the photo on the right, where I’ve circled Kristy standing outside the front entrance. Unbelieveable!

Anyway – we jumped back on the bus (downstairs this time) after a quick coffee, and finished off the Uptown loop. Again, we got dropped off in Times Sqaure, and killed the afternoon with some shopping. Of course, being a couple weeks before Christmas, it was basically bedlem. People were everywhere! I managed to pick up some new shoes before we headed home.

Our awesome weekend was finished with dinner at Chipotle, followed by the Survivor Vanuatu finale. Want to know who wins?

A huge THANK YOU to Lou and Steve for the awesome wedding present!