Stars on Sunday

We started our day yesterday with a trip on the Staten Island ferry, for the views of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.  It's absolutely the best value cruise in town, at $0. The usual practice is to make the crossing then jump straight on the next ferry back to Manhattan, but the Boy was keen to hang around and look for food, so we did.  We happened to arrive towards the end of the Staten Island Half Marathon, so we were able to watch the tail-end of runners coming in, and we checked out a "block party and pizza fest" beyond the finish line.

The almost-completed One World Trade Center building stands out dramatically now in the Lower Manhattan skyline.  Having made our return crossing, we walked over for a closer look. People with pre-booked passes were queueing to view the 9/11 Memorial where the original Twin Towers once stood. The site is fenced in due to building work still going on all around to complete the new World Trade Center.

Next we headed up-town. Destination: the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium.  In the latter (which is a stunning piece of architecture) we watched an out-of-this-world star-show.  In the Museum proper we enjoyed all sorts of fascinating exhibits - from dinosaurs to giant-squid-fights-whale, to the origins of humankind.

We could easily have spent longer there, but we'd already pushed our return schedule back and back...and anyway, the museum was closing.  So we disappeared ourselves into the Subway (possibly the world's most baffling underground rail system) and eventually worked out how to get to Grand Central (which really is fantastically grand), thence back to Yonkers to pick up the car and begin the drive home.  There we collected our Girl, who had travelled back from NY Comic Con with her friends, exhausted but happy after her own action-packed geek-end.