New York.

We’ve managed to cram a lot in during our stay in New York. Since the last update we have done so much more and the days tend to slip into one another. I have trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone four days ago, so I’m going to drop down here a few notes on the main things we’ve been up to.

First and foremost, Kylie has done a lot of shopping while we’ve been here. My mum heads back from to Brisbane today, taking with her quite a bit of our shopping (thanks mum!) which includes an unknown (to me) number of pairs of Kylies shoes and quite a few new business shirts that I have bought and a whole bunch of other stuff. We’ve certainly done our bit to try and kick start the US economy. I might try and get Kylie to do a summary of her purchases when we’re back in Brisbane. No point in doing it on the road, the “kill” count rises too quickly….

Saturday 29 November

Saturday we all went our seperate ways for the day. Mum did the hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the Uptown areas, Kylie went and did some shopping and Jackson and I went to the Intrepid Air & Space Museum.

The Air & Space Museum only recently re-opened after being shut for renovations for a while. The Museum sits on board a retired US Air Craft Carrier which is moored in the River just at the end of the street we’re staying in! (One heck of a yard ornament to have in your street!) What a great facility and museum this is. Jackson and I were both enthralled for the three and a bit hours we walked the decks of this massive ship. We got some photos, but I’ve been having trouble uploading them through this internet connection, hopefully the next place is kinder to me, because we’ve got some great shots to share.

A visit to the museum starts off with a movie about the career of the ship. It’s mainly focused, of course, on the tragic aspect of the lose of life which happens during war. Halfway through I thought I’d made a “dad” mistake taking Jackson in, but he hasnt had any nightmares since and though he asked once after the movie about why’d those people get killed, he was fine with the movie. We were sitting next to a (I presumed from the way he was talking to Jackson before the movie) retired British Naval guy and during the movie he started crying through the movie – the emotions which come back visiting a place like that must be a terrible thing to manage.

The main “exhibits” of the museum are the planes which sit on the deck of the carrier. There must have been 20 different planes and choppers from different Navy’s / Army’s around the world. Jackson loved it and would run from plane to plane and then ask me to read the words on the sign for each plane (some of those Russian designers have VERY difficult names).

You also get to walk through the hanger of the carrier and in the hanger is a kids museum area where they can get their hands on all sorts of cool stuff, including sitting in the cockpit of a M*A*S*H style chopper, a plane simulator where you try to land a plane on the deck of a carrier, there’s a scoreboard which counts the number of “Jap” planes and ships the carrier took down and some models which show the carrier in its different incarnations.

Another exhibit is the Concord, which sits on the pier next to the Intreipd. The Concord is dwarfed by the Intrepid. I was looking forward to looking inside the Concorde, which you could do, but they had all the seats enclosed in a plastic bubble and the cockpit was blocked off, so all you got to do was walk down the aisle. Which was pretty boooring, even to me.

By the time we got back from there we met up with Kylie and went down to the Union Square area for a look around. We had lunch at a burger joint and walked around and looked through the stores. Paragon Sports was the main shop we visited and we got some stuff for the ski part of our trip – cool new goggles!

That night Jackson and I went to a cirque de soleil show and Kylie and Mum went to see the Musical Wicked. They liked Wicked better than Mumma Mia. Jackson thoroughly enjoyed the Cirque show, particularly the acrobatics of the show including a great trampoline act and during the finale huge fans sent a deluge of paper snowflakes out over the audience. This was pretty cool.

Jackson’s video:

This started out as a short note, ended up being longer than I thought, so I’ll wrap it up there. more to come.

over and out