The following day was our last full day, and it was spent driving the 250 miles south again along the I-95 to Miami for one last night (stopping in at Ace Venturer Mall again so I could buy lollies from It's Sugar, and so Mo could buy an iPod after she dropped her last one once too often and that was the end of it).

I miss driving already!

Looking over Miami and the coast. I was not happy to be leaving!

These two would have to be the couple from hell to be stuck next to for three hours on a plane! I was sitting there minding my own business, she came along and sat next to me, and he fluffed around with their hand-luggage in the overhead compartment. He asked her, "Do you want anything out of here?", she ignored him, he repeated the question, she continued to ignore him, he said, "I guess not then!", slammed the thing shut! For the next three hours they were at each other non-stop, swearing and yelling and carrying on so half the plane could hear - it was bloody funny! Apparently they'd just broken up the night before after something happened in town and the cops turned up and arrested one of them or something. Furthermore, he'd been in contact with an ex-girlfriend and she was all pissy about that and oh it was just great! After a while he got so fed up with this he essentially gave up and adopted the brace position for a while hehe, but before long they were at it again. She didn't have much of an appetite because of this so she gave me her plane food hahaha brilliant!

It was another miserable cloudy day in Newark which pissed me off because I was intending to spend a few hours going for a wander before the flight to Edinburgh. Regardless, I got more of a view than I did a fortnight ago, and because of this (and because I was on the right side of the plane to notice), I was able to see how close Manhattan was! I had no idea, and suddenly I realised I may be able to spend my few free hours over there instead - sweeeeet!

When I landed I found a random security guard and asked her how I can get to Manhattan. Long story short, a 30-minute train ride later and I was there - unreal! Needless to say I've always wanted to see New York, but barely an hour earlier I had no idea I'd be there today! The shot on the left shows Madison Sqaure Garden.

Ahhh New York, the city of hotdog stands and Macca's (four McDonald's per square-mile in Manhattan!).

Ground Zero was full of tourists obviously, but there was a really sombre atmosphere about the place and a lot of stunned faces.

This is the newly constructed 52-storey, 228-metre-high Tower 7. It's the first to be constructed since 9/11.

There was a guy at the site who claims to have been in the immediate area when the towers were hit. This building here was, according to this guy, damaged beyond repair when the towers collapsed. It is so unstable that it cannot be demolished in a controlled fashion (i.e. blown up), and instead it is being painstakingly taken down floor-by-floor. Every so often (again according to this guy) they find bodies in there that were trapped under debris when the towers collapsed; the latest one was supposedly found just a few weeks ago. Again, I don't know how true any of this is and I can't find any information on the building.

The Hilton Hotel is right across the road (and had almost all of its front glass panelling smashed when the planes hit), so I marched in there and took the elevator up to the top floor hoping to get a birds-eye view of the site. Unfortunately the view was on the wrong side of the building hehe, but I did get this shot of the Brooklyn Bridge (foregorund) and Manhattan Bridge :)

Obsessed conspiracy theorists were plentiful at the site, with the dude in the middle even filming the cops. I did pick up a leaflet from one of them and read it later on the plane. I've got to be honest it contains some bloody good points, but I'm just not sure how true any of them are. For example:

• "If the heat caused the floor trusses of the towers to sag and pull the perimeter columns in, thus initiating a pancake collapse, why were the 47 core steel columns not left standing as the floors pancaked around them like a spindle on a record player? The NIST computer simulation even shows these beams remaining in a video, with no explanation as to how they collapsed."

• "Why did the collapse of WTC 7 have the signature of a controlled demolition? At 5:20PM the 47-storey steel-framed building collapsed vertically, falling in 6 seconds into a pile only 7 storeys tall, much like a controlled demolition. Structural damage on the south side facing the tower (if the only cause of the collapse) would have toppled the building over; photos of the other 3 sides show little damage. Why were news agencies like BBC and CNN reporting WTC 7 had collapsed almost a half-hour before it actually did? How would they know this when no steel-framed building has ever collapsed due to fire in history prior to 9/11? Who told them? There is no official report explaining the collapse of WTC 7."

• "In the week leading up to 9/11 an extremely high number of put options were placed specifically on American Airlines and United Airlines indicating someone knew those stocks would decrease in value. The firm used to place some of the PUT options was chaired by the number three Executive Director of the CIA, A. B. Krongard."

• "Six weeks before 9/11, Larry Silverstein purchases the WTC complex including an insurance policy that specifies coverage against a terrorist attack."

• "Why were the tapes of the communications between ATC (Air Traffic Control) and the pilots/hijackers destroyed by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)?"

• "Why was standard operating procedure not followed that when a plane goes off course or radio contact is lost, jet fighters are immediately scrambled to visually check on the plane and its pilots?"

• "In the event of a hijacking, all airline pilots are trained to key an emergency four-digit code into their plane's transponder. This would surreptitiously alert air traffic controllers, causing the letters "HJCK" to appear on their screens. How is it that not one of the four pilots entered this code?"

• "Why were FBI agents immediately confiscating all video evidence of the impact around the Pentagon within moments of the attack, and why have we not seen any of those videos except for 5 grainy frames from a security camera?"

• "Sibel Edwards, a former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance, said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing a rarely used "state secrets privilege".

Those points are all very interesting and obviously arouse suspicion, but these two points really interested me as they provided motive:

• "On September 10th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon had 2.3 trillion dollars of undocumented adjusts, meaning the money is missing. The accountants responsible for tracking down the missing money happened to be in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed, thus killing them along with their investigation. What was the money used for, and was it never meant to be found?"

• "Billions upon billions of dollars in defence and yet the systems to defend such an attack were not in place. We are told there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the attacks. The answer then must be: give more money to defence. It's funny how incompetence seems to get rewarded with bigger budgets!"

There are many many more points in this leaflet, but like I said I don't know how many have any degree of truth to them and hence I don't read too far into any of it.

After leaving Ground Zero I went further south to get a view out towards the Statue of Liberty (too bad it was such an overcast day). She looks as though she's imitating that crane in the background hehe).

Next I caught the subway north to Times Square! This place is one big madhouse of people, traffic, and animated advertising - I loved it!

A few blocks north of Times Square is the massive Central Park.

I first had to have a hotdog from one of the park's many hotdog stands! :)

So that was my 2.5-hour teaser of New York City, and I would absolutely love to go back!

Update: A little over five years later, I ended up living here :)

This is the after-shot of my tan after a fortnight of hot Florida sun hahaha ;) Shit I'm going to miss this weather (again)!

After an uneventful flight with another round of Casino Royale, I was back - much to my disappointment. Looks pretty much how I left it really.