New York has never been high on my list of must-see destinations. In fact, it ranks pretty high on the list of places I wanted to avoid. I always thought of the city as huge, crowded, expensive and dangerous. Now that I’m here, I think of it as huge, crowded, expensive…and kind of interesting.

Granted, we haven’t done much yet. The train ride from Boston took four hours, and by the time our cabbie fought his way through traffic and deposited us at our Upper West Side hotel, it was mid-afternoon. We finally hopped the subway to Times Square and caught a sightseeing bus that took us all around downtown and lower Manhattan. It was an open-air double-decker bus, so of course everyone sat up top, but no one dared sit up too tall or they’d be clipped by overhanging traffic lights and tree branches. Huh.

Still, we were so happy to be able to sit back and relax that we didn’t care about having to watch our heads. The guide had all kinds of interesting factoids about every park, church, and skyscraper we passed, and there were a LOT of them. (One factoid that stuck with me: most schools in Manhattan don’t have playgrounds, so at recess time the cops actually close down a section of the street so the kids have somewhere to play. How sad is that?)

This might be the city that never sleeps, but I’m ready for a good long snooze. Tomorrow we’ll have a full day to explore…

On the bus at Times Square