A 7am domestic flight means a 5am Uber which means a 4am wakeup time. On the other hand, 7am means improved chances of plane being there, crew being there, and weather not being a factor.
(I had 2 United Club free passes expiring in a few days)
So we made it to Newark.
“Luckily” we could go directly to our hotel room at the Hyatt House Jersey City, since we’d already paid for it for last night. I’ll tangent here for a moment and say that, despite it being 2024, hotels still can’t figure out reliable digital keys. I don’t know why I expected ours would work. Also, this Hyatt’s elevators are weird. Anyway.
We dropped our stuff, suncreened up, and hit the 10:10am ferry from Paulus Hook, about a two minute walk from our hotel, over to Brookfield Place in lower Manhattan.
The terminal is adjacent to Brookfield Place mall, so Sher and Siena grabbed crepes. We then sat outside the One World Trade Center entrance before our 11:30am reservation to go to the top.
They do a good job with the whole WTC experience. There’s an interesting-ish queue in the basement for the elevators.
In the elevator itself, all the walls are displays that show what NYC would’ve looked like over time from its founding to current day. I’m sure there were discussions during the design phase about making glass elevators; I’m glad they went in this direction. Once at the top, they queue people into a shuttered room where they have a 3 minute presentation and then do a “reveal” of the view by raising the shades. It was a clear, sunny day, so the effect landed. After that you’re free to move around 3 floors at the top at your leisure. They peer pressure you into taking a family photo, but this time we leaned into it since we don’t do photos of all of us that often. The view is, of course, spectacular.
We made our way back down to ground level, then over to the connected Oculus mall/station.
After checking this out, we had a decision to make. The forecast and radar showed severe storms the rest of the day, and we weren’t prepared for walking around a city in the rain. And before the storms’ arrival we had the promise of hot and sticky weather. Plus, all of us were operating on minimal sleep. So we bailed. We ferried back across the Hudson and crashed in our hotel.
Later, Siena and Sherri would brave the rains to grab Subway subs, and I ordered a miso salmon bowl from Sweetgreen. Once the rain stopped, me and the kids went outside to play on the playground next to the PATH station and take photos down by the river.
Throughout the day people were posting on the (unofficial) cruise Facebook group about their travel woes, canceled flights in Toronto, Tampa, and Dallas, all necessitating those people to embark on drives they weren’t planning on. We were feeling grateful we’d left enough time to get to the ship and that the air travel system worked for us that morning.