Hi guys
Some month ago I did a wonderful journey to the US and Canada together with friends.
I was writing a small diary of all the places where we have been and I would love to share it with you.
As its a diary its written as if we are there at the moment :)
We are currently on a 3 week trip through the north-east of the USA and the south-east of Canada. As planning such a trip is quite a big thing and maybe Im not the only one who wants to do it, Im going to write reports about all the locations where we have been, what we have seen on our journey and what is in my point of few recommendable or not. I try to highlight things you should know with lots of stars because I think that should be most useful for you.
Everything written here is totally my perspective. If you have a different opinion to some spots its totally ok and I would be happy if you share them with me. You are also very welcome to ask questions.
Day 1: The adventure starts!
We started our big holiday to America in Linz.
(Small town in Austria, not too important to know that)
We: thats me and my girlfriend Alena.
We decided to fly from the airport in Praha via London to New York.
Praha is the capital of Czech Republik. If you don't know it, please go there! Its a wonderful place to be, probably one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
But as our story should be about America, we skip that for now.
First small challenge: The train in this wonderful small village was 40 minutes late.
No problem!!
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We arrived at Praha airport in time. Checkin, baggage dropoff and security check worked very well.
Important: For going to the USA you need something called ESTA.
That costs 14$ and allows you to enter the country.
For Canada there is a similar thing called ETA. Thats only 7$ and you only need it if you enter the country by airplane. We would not have needed it, nevertheless to support that wonderful country, we bought it.
At the gate, we saw our second challenge. Our plane had a small delay of about 2 hours. As we had about 1:45h for switching planes in London...
The captain did his best to be faster than planned and we landed in London 35 minutes before departure of our connecting flight.
The crew was smart and they told everybody to keep sitting down to let the people exit first who have connecting flights. Somehow theoretically wonderful concepts don't always work in reality :) To make a Long story short: we ran as fast as possible but only found an already closed gate.
So back to the counter of British airways.
People there were very pleasant. They booked us to another flight 3 hours later and gave us 2x 10 GBP vouchers for dinner.
This time we managed to get onboard and the flight to New York was perfect.
I was a bit tired.
Seems that there is a lot more space in British airways planes than Im used to from other airlines. Recommendable!!!
Food was also ok, so we had a good time.
After landing in New York you have to do the immigration stuff.
Standing in a long queue waiting to be checked.
It doesn't matter if you just transfer or if you stay in America, you have to do the immigration. Plan some time for that!
Immigration was a lot better than I was told before by other people. The guy checking us was very pleasant and we were joking around about my girlfriend being responsible for my lack of hair.
After immigration there was the third challenge waiting for us:
Our luggage didn't arrive.
Again the employees of British airways were very helpful. We got a debit card with 89$ from them for our expenses and some telephone numbers to call the next day.
As we again lost time, it was already 1 o'clock morning when we started the journey to our accommodation.
We had a booked accommodation in Jersey through AirBNB.
Question: How the hell do you get from JFK airport in the middle of the night to West New York?
Airport train is good to leave the airport region. So go till the end station.
Both end stations lead to the blue metro line.
This one brings you in the city center.
Important to know: The subway system of New York does not cover the Jersey side (Everything west of the Hudson river) There is no subway there.
So the best way to get there day and night is to go to 42nd street bus terminal in Manhattan by subway and then switch to a bus.
All destinations between 30th and 60th street can be easily reached by a bus to "Bergenline avenue"
Luckily our host wrote me some of these information before so we at least knew a bit what to do. The travel was good, even if its a strange feeling to use the metro in an unknown city in the middle of the night. We saw lots of interesting people there, but as every now and then policeman entered the subway we felt quite save.
Also the bus journey was good and if you once understand the system with numbers of streets and avenues, its easy to find stuff.
In Manhattan all streets are either from north to south or east to west.
Everything north to south is called avenue and has numbers. (1st Av, 2nd Av...) Everything east to west is called street. They also have these numbers going up from south to north.
To find a place you can just say for example 42nd street, 8th avenue. Every dummy can find it.
Jersey (at least the part that is parallel to Manhattan) also has the street numbers.
The avenues have names there instead of numbers.
So we found the right street, but had some problems to find the right avenue.
At 2:30 morning we started to ask people on the street about it. As we were talking to 2 friendly girls who didn't know our address, another guy proactively asked us if he can help. He looked it up in his phone and insisted of really leading us to the door of the house.
Very nice guy! At that moment I was really happy that I brought presents from Austria for nice people like him.
As you can imagine we directly went to bed and slept like babies.