New York City Travel Guide

Hostels generally offer dormitory no-frill style accommodation, separated by gender, with shared bathrooms. Most hostels offer real budget type of accommodation with only the very basics. Some hostels do offer private rooms, however, and occasionally these rooms may even have a private bathroom. Many hostels offer shared kitchens and living areas and some also have Internet access on site. Hostelling is a popular way for students and young people to travel, but most hostels nowadays don’t have age restrictions any longer which means even middle aged individuals and seniors are welcome to stay. It’s a bare bones way of traveling, but one of the benefits is that it does offer the opportunity to connect with other like-minded travelers. Often the atmosphere at hostels is very informal, casual and friendly, so even when traveling as a single person it should be quite easy to make new friends.

Some of the hostel websites also offer message boards, travel stories and various travel-related services such as travel insurance, rail passes, adventure tours, flights & car rentals. One very nice feature of some of the hostel websites is that they offer ratings of hostel properties that were completed by previous travelers, providing some insight into the quality of the property in question. Hostel websites generally allow you to search for availability by date and to make a reservation online.

As of March 2005, dorm-style accommodation can go for as low as US$ 25.00 per night, with most of the properties charging between US$30.00 to $40.00 per night. Private rooms range from about US$27.50 and up per person, with most of the properties coming in between US$35.00 and to US$ 70.00 per night per person.

Here is a list of some of the main hostelling websites:

www.hostels.com
The Hostels.com website indicates that it features the most comprehensive selection of hostels on the internet with almost 7,000 hostels listed.

www.hostelsclub.com
Hostelsclub refers to itself as a young and dynamic company providing the budget traveler with an online booking engine for destinations all over the world: Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa. Hostelsclub offers a wide range of accommodation choices for all budget travelers.

www.hihostels.com
Hostelling International (HI) operates a network of more than 4,000 hostels in over 60 countries. Their website indicates that the USA they offer the largest network of quality hostels.

www.hostelweb.com
Hostelweb specializes in the Western United States with over 67 hostels in 11 western states. Obviously not a choice for NYC, but certainly a good reference for western US travel plans.

www.hostelworld.com
Hostelworld.com provides online bookings at thousands of hostels worldwide. You can check out their hostel reviews, view photographs and read detailed descriptions of all their hostels. You can confirm reservations at a selection of youth hostels, independent hostels and international hostels in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America and Oceania.

Happy hostelling…

Susanne Pacher is the publisher of a website called Travel and Transitions(http://www.travelandtransitions.com). Travel and Transitions deals with unconventional travel and is chock full of advice, tips, real life travel experiences, interviews with travellers and travel experts, insights and reflections, cross-cultural issues, contests and many other features. You will also find stories about life and the transitions that we face as we go through our own personal life-long journeys.

Submit your own travel stories in our first travel story contest(http://www.travelandtransitions.com/contests.htm) and have a chance to win an amazing adventure cruise on the Amazon River.

“Life is a Journey

Since our plane landed nice and early we had virtually a whole day left to explore yesterday. The weather was pretty nice, quite sunny when we started, although it clouded over a little and was a little on the cool side, it never got much above 15 degrees Celsius.

Around noon time we hopped on the Q subway line, which is literally 5 minutes from our bed and breakfast, and we made our way into Manhattan. The subway actually emerges at the Manhattan Bridge and we got a good look at the Brooklyn Bridge and the south-eastern tip of Manhattan.

We decided to get off on Times Square, figuring that this would be pretty good place to start exploring NYC. Times Square, with all its neon advertising signs, and promotional displays is something else. The sidewalks were totally full of people strolling and tons of promoters were handing out flyers for broadway shows, comedy shows and other entertainment events. There is so much advertising in the Times Square area with lights and displays blinking everywhere, that the individual advertisements actually started to run into one another in my mind, probably not the effect the advertisers tried to achieve. Indeed, the hustle and bustle in this area is huge and can get a little overwhelming.

We strolled around that area for a while, and walked by Rockefeller Center, although we did not get to explore the whole complex. Then we tracked down Grand Central Terminal and walked through this grandiose historic train station which opened in 1913. There are over 100 commuter train platforms at Grand central and they all run off a glorious central concourse.

The east side of Grand Central opens out almost straight onto the Chrysler Building, and considering that I am a huge fan of Art Deco skyscrapers, I had to go inside this 1929 masterpiece. As a tourist you can only access the lobby, but the central area with its ceiling mural and the authentic Art Deco elevators (and their doors covered in wood marquetry) are definitely worth a little detour.

Then we snaked our way up towards Central Park, mostly on Lexington and Fifth Avenues. We walked by the (apparently just closed) famous Plaza Hotel and into the south end of Central Park, a masterpiece of landscape design and 850 acres of much-needed recreational space by the famous landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead. We only explored the south end, including the Dairy and Sheep Meadow and headed out onto Central Park West with all its stately apartment buildings, including the Dakota Building, in front of which John Lennon was shot in 1980. The Strawberry Fields hillside garden was dedicated to his memory.

Everything is blooming here right now, and New York City is definitely a few weeks ahead of Toronto in terms of the horticultural cycle. Something was in the air, and I had to sneeze about a hundred times, and by the end of the day we both had to pick up some allergy medication since we were both battling major hayfever symptoms.

Then a brief hop on the subway later, we popped up again in Greenwich Village, a beautiful neighbourhood of brownstone townhouses and took in the ambience. We ended up at a nice little restaurant on 7th Avenue, called “Pennyfeathers” where we had a beautiful dinner in an enclosed porch so we could take in the street life.

A couple of subway rides later we came back to our temporary home in Brooklyn where we dropped into bed exhausted from all the walking, trying to catch up on a bit of rest for the next day.

Susanne Pacher is the publisher of a website called Travel and Transitions(http://www.travelandtransitions.com). Travel and Transitions deals with unconventional travel and is chock full of advice, tips, real life travel experiences, interviews with travellers and travel experts, insights and reflections, cross-cultural issues, contests and many other features. You will also find stories about life and the transitions that we face as we go through our own personal life-long journeys.

Submit your own travel stories in our first travel story contest(http://www.travelandtransitions.com/contests.htm) and have a chance to win an amazing adventure cruise on the Amazon River.

“Life is a Journey

So yesterday morning our American Airways flight (booked for free with my Airmiles) left at 7:13 am to bring us to the Big Apple, a place I had always had a fascination with, but only had visited twice very briefly in my life,and that more than 10 years ago.

Just flying in over NYC was an experience itself, seeing all the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the various bridges linking the mainland with the island, and shortly after flying over the Rykers Island prison we landed at La Guardia Airport, a rather small airport actually, when compared to Toronto.

Our luggage was out in no time and we grabbed a couple of week long transit passes (a pretty good deal at US$24 for unlimited travel for a whole week) and we started our trip to Brooklyn. One bus (through a mostly Latin area in Queens) and one subway ride (through Manhattan) later, we ended up in our lovely bed and breakfast in a gorgeous neighbourhood, just south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Since we didn’t know the area and the website of our B&B had provided just a tiny little map, we had chosen the wrong subway line to get off from and we had to walk about 1/2 hour to find the B&B, but it gave us a good first look at this part of Brooklyn.

It is an area with stately homes and houses that are about a century old. Magnolia and cherry trees are blooming everywhere and gardens are meticulously kept around here. Our Brookly neighbourhood feels very safe and we got to meet our bed and breakfast hosts: a very hospitable and outgoing couple in their 40s by the name of Harry and Bibi. They showed us to our room, a nice room on the third floor of this spacious house, with a shared bathroom.

Actually the whole house has been turned into a B&B and there are 8 bedrooms, the 2nd and 3rd floor of the house each have their own kitchen and bedroom areas and it actually makes for a really comfortable stay since it feels more like having your own apartment, rather than just renting a room.

Before leaving I thoroughly researched accommodation options in New York City, and after looking at all the options (hotels, hostels, B&Bs), I decided the B&B option would be the most comfortable route to go. And at US$90.00 a night it’s definitely turned out to be one of the most affordable options and a great base to start exploring New York City…

Susanne Pacher is the publisher of a website called Travel and Transitions(http://www.travelandtransitions.com). Travel and Transitions deals with unconventional travel and is chock full of advice, tips, real life travel experiences, interviews with travellers and travel experts, insights and reflections, cross-cultural issues, contests and many other features. You will also find stories about life and the transitions that we face as we go through our own personal life-long journeys.

Submit your own travel stories in our first travel story contest(http://www.travelandtransitions.com/contests.htm) and have a chance to win an amazing adventure cruise on the Amazon River.

“Life is a Journey

New York City, the big apple, one could easily get lost in a fast-paced high priced place as this city. Even people who live in the suburbs of New York can experience a sudden culture shock when they enter the city limits. There’s the concrete, crowds, Times Square, museums and just about any kind of information overload you can imagine. If you want you can see the softer side of the city by touring small grocery shops, and walking Central Park or you can get a taste of the corporate business world or walk along Wall Street for a ways.

It’s established that it’s very easy to overload the itinerary on a New York vacation. So you’re going to have to decide before you go what you want to see and be discriminating and brutally honest with yourself. Do you really want to spend all day for a week pounding the pavement in effort to try and reach destinations all over town? You’re stay in New York will be a rat race.

Here’s a sample itinerary of things you can do in New York;

On day one you check into the hotel and get comfortable. Don’t have any major treks planned, but if you can’t sit still use this time to wander around the hotel and the local streets to get familiar with your location. For later on in the evening you’ve all ready secured tickets to a Broadway Musical. How about an industry staple like Cats?

Later on you take a trip to Central Park. Bring the kids and a picnic, and $1 each for a spin on the Carousel at 64th St. mid Park. There’s also a Wildlife Conservation Center where kids will literally spend hours looking at the Sea Lions. On Tuesdays, from 5-9 pm the Cooper Hewitt Museum has pay what you wish admission. On Thursdays, Guggenheim Museum has pay what you wish hours from 6-8 pm. There are also lots of other museums in New York that have free hours and pay what you wish hours and those that don’t have free hours do have times with very good admission rates. So it’s fairly easy to see the sites in New York on a budget. Hey the New York Library is free and it’s a wonderful piece of architecture.

As for good and exotic food it is everywhere in New York. You visit a different ethnic restaurant, deli, street vendor, or cafe for lunch each day.

When you head home you will have plenty of memories of the sites and sounds from your New York City vacation and there’s certainly plenty of New York left for you to see on another trip.

Gail Leino is known throughout the internet world as Mrs. Party. She has become the internet’s leading authority on selecting the best possible party supplies with clever themes. Her simple party planning approach demostrates how to use proper manners while teaching etiquette with organizational skills. She shares lots of interesting fun facts. See travel vacations for more tips and holiday spot destinations.

New York, New York, so good, they named it twice. Corny, I know but it sums up pretty neatly, a city with something for everyone on vacation, whether a weekend break or a full two weeks. There is so much to see and do that it’s hard to pick out the top hits but here’s a selection to choose from.

Must See

Central Park - There’s so much going on here that you can take a full length holiday without ever leaving the park. It’s so huge (843 acres) with playgrounds, sports grounds, nature conservancy, fountains, fortifications, a reservoir with walking/jogging track, sculptures, gardens and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are exhibitions, Tai Chi and Yoga classes, concerts and tours and you can even get married there.

The Empire State Building - Located on 5th Avenue, the Empire State Building is the tallest in New York at approximately 1,453 feet (443 meters). From the 86th floor observation deck you can see the whole of New York City spread out below and on a clear day you can see for as far as 80 miles into the neighbouring states of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts as well as New York State itself.

Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island - Situated on Liberty Island, in New York Harbour, the statue stands at 305 feet (93 meters) tall and was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States and is only accessible by boat. Guided tours of the island and monument are available and this symbol of freedom and democracy must be seen. The Ellis Island Immigration Museum forms part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and preserves the history of the twelve million immigrants who arrived in America seeking their fortunes.

Metropolitan Museum of Art (Central Park) - A must for art lovers, the museum contains permanently over two million works of art, ancient and modern, from all over the world as well as American paintings and sculpture as well as featured specialist exhibitions.

Museum of Modern Art - As you might expect, the exhibits here are not restricted to paintings, drawings and sculpture but include film and media, photography and architecture and design.

Times Square - Famous for it’s coloured neon signs, Times Square is best seen at night. There are restaurants, theatres, cinemas and clubs galore - enough for even the most hardened night-lifer.

Must Do

Shopping - New York is renowned for its shopping, particularly at Christmas, when it takes on a magical quality. Fifth Avenue is THE place to shop in New York. All the big names are here including, of course, Saks Fifth Avenue and Trump Tower.

See a show on Broadway - Broadway is the street in New York which means “theatre” to most people so seeing a show here is essential. There are only four theatres actually ON Broadway, which only covers the twelve blocks from West 41st Street to West 53rd Street but there are plenty more east and west of here.

Eat pastrami and/or salt beef sandwiches - New York has a fabulous selection of delis so don’t forget to try one of these typical sandwiches or how about a bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese or potato pancakes - never mind the waistline, you’re on holiday.

Hear some jazz - Harlem to Greenwich Village is an area full of jazz clubs - so many in fact that you might do well to get a guided tour.

Visit Ground Zero - the site of the World Trade Center - now a memorial to those who died in the terrible tragedy of 9th September, 2001.

Absorb the financial atmosphere of Wall Street, home of the New York Stock Exchange - unfortunately, you can’t visit the Stock Exchange at the moment but take in the architecture of the old banks and buildings here.

——————————————————-
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to New York Vacation
——————————————————-