Rush Hour

I had been up since 4:30am to be ready for starting up the bus and picking up our group at 5:45am in lower Manhattan. Doug would do the first leg of the journey home, so he was driving this morning. Even at this early hour there was a considerable amount traffic, but we got into the city without a back-up. We left Manhattan via Madison Ave and were soon out on I-87. Reaching the New Haven area in Connecticut I couldn’t but marvel over a 20mile-long back-up of commuter traffic. If this is going on every single morning why in the world aren’t people using public transit? The cities of the east are choking in traffic, and unless there’s gonna be laws regulating the use of private vehicles, this problem is going to increase even more.                                            20-mile long commuter back-up Being on the road OUT of the big cities we were making good headway and reached New Hampshire at noon. I took over driving from there and the weather was just gorgeous. until we reached Bangor, ME from where it started raining a bit. We passed through the Houlton,ME border and were back in Fredericton at 8pm. Not bad for such a long trip, yet I had been on duty for almost 14hrs. which is the legal maximum of service hours in Canada. We still had some paperwork to do, so I wasn’t at my shabby motel before 9pm. Tired enough I just went to bed and slept for 10hrs. Morning ran up with some rain and I grabbed my stuff to drive over to a gas station for coffee. 2.5hrs. later I was home on Campobello where Molly came running out to say hello and welcome back Dad. What a great thing coming home after this 6-day trip to one of the biggest (and craziest) cities in North America. New York – often called New York City or the City of New York to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part – is the most populous city in the  United States and the center of the New York metropolitan area, the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States and one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which is a separate county of New York State. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. With a census-estimated 2014 population of 8,491,079 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km2), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. By 2014 census estimates, the New York City metropolitan region remains by a significant margin the most populous in the United States, as defined by both the Metropolitan Statistical Area(20.1 million residents) and the Combined Statistical Area (23.6 million residents). New York City traces its roots to its 1624 founding as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626.The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a globally recognized symbol of the United States and its democracy. Many districts and landmarks in New York City have become well known, and the city received a record 56 million tourists in 2014, hosting three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world.