New York, New York - Day 1

August 7, 2006 - In the end, the whole trip was really a 20+ hour bus ride.

This past weekend, my friends and I went on one of those "Safeway bus tours" to the Eastern USA. The trip was supposed to cover three American cities: New York, Atlantic City and Philadelphia. Not that I'm a stranger to bus tours - I've actually done a 1 week bus tour around Alberta a couple of years ago in addition to the Eastern Canada tour that pretty much every Chinese in Toronto has been on, but personally I have never been a fan. The early wake up calls, the rushed sightseeing, the gross Chinese buffet meals are not things that I want to remember a trip by. However, because my friends and I decided to go pretty last minute, there wasn't enough time (nor money) to really plan out a decent trip. The bus tour, which cost us only $190/person for three days, was the best and cheapest way to go.

So on Saturday morning, at 6:30 am, I joined hundreds, if not thousands, of mainly Chinese tourists at the First Markham Place parking lot, waiting for our bus. There must have been at least 50 buses that morning, going to all sorts of places: Mt. Tremblant, Ottawa/Montreal/Quebec City, Orlando, Boston, NYC - the list goes on. We found our bus fairly quickly and was greeted by our guide, who gave us our numbers and our seats. Once everyone was on board, we were told the bus ride to NYC would take at least 10 hours.

Along the way, we made several rest stops. We also stopped just outside Rochester at an outlet mall (no trip to upstate NY is complete without a stop at an outlet mall!) for lunch and for some quick shopping. Though I didn't go nuts (mainly due to my financial situation), the high Canadian dollar plus the dirt cheap prices made buying things really tempting. An hour or so later, we were back on the bus. The scenery was starting to get boring, the guide didn't do much to help alleviate our boredom, so what was there to do beside sleep?

We made it to New Jersey at around dinner time. We pulled into this strip mall where our buffet restaurant was located. My friend Freeman quickly pointed out the Pizza Hut and McDonalds just around the corner. Why pay 16 USD for gross Chinese buffet when we could spend half of that on pizza? So Freeman marched up to our guide, demanded a refund, and off we went to Pizza Hut. Another hour of really quick eating later, we were back on the bus - on our way to our hotel in Jersey.

We made it to our hotel in New Jersey shortly after 9 p.m. In the end, we didn't see NYC the whole day - we actually barely did anything that day. It was just a long long bus ride. I was pretty disappointed - mainly because I vaguely remember that on my previous NYC bus tour trip almost 7 years ago, we actually managed to get into the city (and saw a few attractions) before it was dark - so why did it take us so long to get to New York this time around?

Tomorrow, we were promised - we would see the city.