I made a recent trip to New York City and it just so happened to be the week that Storm Stella hit the north east coast of the US.Not the best timing for a Trip to the US but what's a girl to do when the flights and hotel are booked and a lot of time and effort had gone into the planning of the trip, you just grin and bare it and hope that its not has bad as everyone predicted.
I arrived in New York on the Sunday before the storm was due, to freezing conditions but the sun was still shinning, that's OK I an cope with the cold as long as the sun is out. If the weather can stay like this for the next four days I am winning, but alas this was not to be. It was similar weather to that what I arrived to on the Monday cold but bright so I was thinking usually it warms up a bit before a big snow storm maybe I have got away with this maybe the snow will have been blow off course and will by pass us and I will be lucky to have gotten away with it!
How naive I was, I awoke to snow covered roof tops and inches of snow covering the roads and footpaths with snow falling thick and fast as well as huge gusts of wind, winner!! Not to be deterred and hoping that the snow fall will stop any time I ventured out. I had been told that the museums should still be open and the like so I jumped on the Subway down town with the plan of visiting the Ground Zero Museum and Workshop. As I came out of the subway station a short walk from the Museum I saw Starbucks and it was open, so I decided to grab a quick breakfast before making my way to the museum, while I was enjoying a bite to eat and taking full advantage of their free WIFI I checked Google maps to see how far a way the museum was and how long it would take to walk it was then that a little alert popped up on my screen telling me that in actual fact the Museum would not be open today!! Bloody hell I've come all the way down town what can I do now? I thought best thing to do would be to visit the 9/11 Memorial as this was outdoors and something you can just walk up to. Unfortunately due to the bad weather I could see the Memorial but I couldn't get as close to it as you normally would be able to but was still very moving to be in the place that the horrible tragedy took place. Having paid my respects at the Memorial I thought I would nip in quickly to Target that was just a little further along the street to see if I could get some Knicks clothing for the Basketball game I had tickets for that evening.
Oh My God!! Trying to walk 300m up the street was incredibly difficult the now was not falling as massive hail stones punching you in the face no matter how well wrapped up I thought I and coupled with that the winds had picked up and were reported to have reached 60 mph. As you can imagine it was very treacherous conditions and it was starting to get a little dangerous. Once I had, had a little look in Target and hoping that the wind and hail would ease off I headed back out in search of the Subway station to head back up town, I didn't want to get stuck down here far away from the Hotel. I got off the subway at Madison Square Gardens, as I had, had no luck finding anything with the New York Knicks on I figured the Gardens would have a shop I could pick something up. As I came to ground level I was fortunate to find a discount sports clothing stores and picked up a T-Shirt. Once done in their the wind and hail had picked up again so I ran into TGI Fridays and decided that this was as good a place as any to grab some lunch and once again wait for the wind and hail to die down a bit before heading out, I was lucky this place was open as a lot of businesses had made the decision to close that day for the safety of their staff.
By this time a lot of the day had gone, trying to walk in 60 mph winds takes up a lot of your time!! So once I had eaten I headed back to my hotel to freshen up before heading back out for the Basketball that evening. When I headed back out the snow and hail had finally stopped and the wind had died down considerably so the worst was now behind me, thank god!!
The next day I headed back out to pick up where I left off with my New York sight seeing, taking in a tour of the Rockefeller Centre and a little stroll around Central Park. I was amazed at how quickly the roads and pathways had been cleared, there were people out doing this on the Tuesday and it looks like people had worked through the night to ensure that everything was done for the Wednesday. The snow unfortunately piled up at crossroads and I found a few crossings to be a bit dicey trying the clamber over huge piles of snow but for the most part getting around by foot was no problem at all. By the Thursday I had noticed massive trucks scooping big piles of the snow into the back and it appears that it gets shipped elsewhere to melt as the city just cant handle that amount of melted water!!
New York in the snow is so pretty and Central Park in particular was magical. Apart from losing one day of sight seeing the city was incredibly resilient and bounced back pretty quickly and was back to its busy bustling self in no time at all. I would definitely need to re-visit this amazing city in the summer one to do all the things I didn't get a chance to but also to experience how different the city can be in the warmer weather!
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