3rd day: New York I

On that day we took the morning bus and left to New York. It was only a 2.5 hours drive and we were already at the 42nd street Port Authority Bus Terminal all together with our roller blades.
The terminal is the largest in the United States and the busiest in the world by volume of traffic, serving about 7,000 buses and 200,000 people on an average weekday. It has 223 departure gates and 1,250 car parking spaces, as well as commercial and retail space. In 2011, there were more than 2.263 million bus departures from the terminal.

Just a few blocks and we were already at Time square, which is originally called Longacre square and was renamed as The New York Times moved here in 1904. It supposed to be the world s most visited tourist attraction with more than 39 million visitors a year. Just to compare France the most visited country receives 79 million tourist a year. The US 62 million anyway, which means that 2 out 3 people visiting the US goes to the square. So did we as well..... 

5 more minutes on the rollers and we reached the southern rim of the Central Park, which was opened in 1873 and has a surface of around 370ha. It is 2.5 miles (4 km) long between 59th Street (Central Park South) and 110th Street (Central Park North), and is 0.5 miles (0.8 km) wide between Fifth Avenue and Central Park West and has an annual budget of around 40million USD.Back in the 80's it had a bad reputation because of crime, but thanks to its own police department, these days there are "only" apr. 100 cases registered a year. My favourite place in the park is the Bow Bridge, which is a background for lot of movies, like The Highlander for example with C Lambert.

We crossed the park and arrived at the 86th street and Lexington Avenue at the Guggenheim museum. The founder S. Guggenheim, who had gold mines in Alaska in the late 1890's and a wife from the Rotschild family retired himself relatively early and was living to his art collection, which he started to build as of the works of Vasily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Joan Miró etc.

On the West side of the park we visited the Museum of Natural History, had a real NY hot dog on the street and were heading south to see the building of the Rockefeller center. The founder Rockefeller made his fortune of oil and is held the world richest man in history. His wealth on adjusted value of these days would make around 500000billion USD.  Just to compare the combined wealth of the Forbes 400 was 1.5 trillion in 2012.

Via the Grand Central Terminal we rolled out to the UN-Headquarter and later in the evening returned to the Times Square. We did that all on our roller blades, approx 20-25km at least. You could never do that on your foot.

More pics
https://picasaweb.google.com/szaipandras/USA2005#