Day 30, 16th Sepember 2011. Ithaca - New York City

Well today was the last day of the first part of the tour!! Me, Gary, Kirsty and Donna were doing the whole way around the USA, but Shannon, Caroline, Daniel, Aaron, Abby, Volker, Loz and Pieter were finishing at New York. We were also getting a new tour leader for the 2nd part of the trip so it was our last day with Art.The other group were all going the whole way round the USA so we would still be seeing them for another 5 weeks.

Before we left we all had to clean our our tents which was super annoying. All the tents had 'names' written on them so we knew whose was whose. Mine and Gary's was called 'Love Shack' so we said goodbye to it for the last time.

We started driving in Art's van for the last time :( we didn't stop anywhere interesting today, just at a random place to eat lunch. It took us about 5 hours to reach the hotel where the trip ended. It was a hotel at Newark airport, which was a little inconventient really for NYC.

When we arrived at the hotel, we said goodbye to Art which was sad (but I didn't cry, I was saving that for tomorrow) and Pieter as he was leaving straight away. The rest of the people that were leaving were staying at the hotel overnight so we were still going to see them tomorrow. I felt really weird that the first part of the trip was over, I had no need to be sad because we weren't even half way through, but I just hate endings and goodbyes, so it was hard.

Getting all our stuff out of the trailer for the last time

We all went up to our rooms and arranged to meet in the lobby at 5.30pm to go into the city. When we got into our room we had a massive clothes explosion. It was so nice to have 2 nights in one place, we could just get our stuff out and make a mess after living out of a bag.

The room had a bath which I was so excited about, so I had a nice relaxing bath before we went out. We met everyone dowstairs when we were ready and had to get the train into NYC. It was $25 each which was so annoying, so over the 2 days we were there me and Gary spent $100 on transport to the city. When we arrived in NYC Penn Station, we took the short walk to Times Square.

First view of the Empire State Building

Was very excited to go to Victoria's Secret tomorrow

We decided to get dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square.

Mmmm Potato Skins

The meal was lovely as usual. Afterwards we had a walk around Times Square and took photos.

Gary and Dan with the naked cowboy

We had a look around a few shops, mainly Toys R Us

Gary had quite a sour worm addiction at the time

We got the train back to the hotel which took ages, didn't get in until way after 12, we were so tired and fell straight asleep.



Day 29, 15th September 2011. Pennsylvania - Ithaca, New York

The tent was soaking wet when we wokeup, not good. One corner of it was like a little ditch of water. Got ready, look tents down and were on our way to Niagara Falls. It wasn't very far away, we drove for about 2 hours to get there.

Once we got there we stood to take some pictures for a while, and then started walking across to where we would be taking the 'Maid of the Mist' tour. 

We all got some blue ponchos which were included in the price and waited about 10 minutes for the next boat to come along.

The tour was really good. Obviously Niagara Falls is such a famous place that it was cool to just see it, but the boat tour made it even more fun. Got to see it up close and also got totally wet in the process!

This is the other boat doing Maid of the Mist tours. Our boat was the American one on the USA side, and that was the Canadian boat in Canada.

After the boat trip was finished, we ate lunch in the parking lot and then got back in the van to drive to camp. It was a really long trip, Art hadn't booked anywhere for us to camp and we ended up driving in circles for a really long time. When we finally got to camp, we put up our tents as quickly as possible and started getting ready for our last official night out with this tour group. Ithaca is a college town in New York, so we knew it would be a fun place to go out. Art had booked a table for us to all go out for dinner and then we were going to find a bar to go to afterwards.

The campsite was a pretty bad one, but we were only there for about a hour and a half so all we did was get ready to go out.

Dinner was quite nice, I can't remember what we had, I think I had pasta and it was really good. As soon as we were finished we made our way to a bar, it was great because they let Loz in even though she was under 21. It was such a fun last night out.

As soon as we got in there Shannon started ordering fishbowls for us all. The bartender was really nice and friendly and was making us so many drinks. We just had the most crazy fun night. Everyone was dancing and drinking, and Gary and Volker drank an entire fishbowl in about 3 minutes! There's not really much more to say about this night because the pictures really speak for themselves. I did meet a really nice girl in the bathrooms who noticed my Snow White bluebird tattoo and we chatted about Disney and Florida for ages, she was really sweet.

Gary and Caroline Robot-ing

It was an amazing night, we had so much fun. It was sad that it would be our last drunken night out with some of these people that we loved so much. I really didn't want them to leave.
We had to leave the bar at abou 1.30am because they were closing, and we all got taxi's back to camp. On the way I was talking to Justine about going to the Magic Kingdom when we were in Orlando, it was good that someone else was as excited as I was about going there.

This was another night that Gary has loads of photos on his camera from the girls bathrooms, haha!