So here I am in New York – State that is, not New York City (yet). I’m in a Holiday Inn near the town of Middleton, NY, which is about 70 miles or so from Newark Liberty International Airport. I picked this place because it seemed a reasonable place to aim for, for the first night.
It’s been a long day. I was up at 5am this morning at the Clayton Hotel at Manchester airport. Checking in and getting through security both went very smoothly at Manchester so I was hanging around for quite a while for my flight at 9:25. It was about 9:35 before we took off and there must have been a good following wind, because we landed at Newark at about 4:35, just 7 or so hours later. That was 11:35 local time. Then things got even slicker – I was through US Immigration in about 5 minutes, waited about 10 minutes for bags, and then took just a few minutes to get through US Customs. So by 12:15 at the latest I was safely groundside at Newark.
I’d arranged to collect a hire car at 2pm but in the event I was at the hire car company before 1 o’clock, even after sitting in the airport sorting myself out. So I was at least an hour early getting on the road to Middleton. This part of the journey had been worrying me a bit – the roads around Newark are very busy and some of them are toll roads – so I’d researched them thoroughly, with printouts from Google Maps and Rand McNally State Maps of New Jersey and New York. In the event the drive was easy – apart from the usual initial panic in the first five minutes when you’re really not sure that you know what you’re doing, everything was fine. In fact I arrived not long after 2pm whereas I’d been expecting to not arrive until perhaps 5 pm.
In order to fill in some time this afternoon I took a short drive over to a nearby shopping mall, the Crystal Run Galleria mall. What stuck me about this place, as with other US shopping malls that I’ve been to, was that it seemed to be nearly deserted. Coming from places such as Sheffield’s Meadowhall, Bristol’s Cabot Circus or the redeveloped Birmingham Bullring, which are always heaving with people, US Malls have always seemed very empty. I suppose they must be profitable or they wouldn’t be created, but it did seem like a ghost town.
That’s about for this first day. It’s eight o’clock local time which means I’ve been up for just over 20 hours. Tomorrow I’m moving on to Poughkeepsie, and I’m oping to explore the Hudson Valley itself. But first I need to sleep.
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