As we are both not allowed to drive a car yet and therefore had to stick to flights to get from city to city, we decided to take the Northeastern Express to get from Boston to New York City. By that we were not only able to see something more of the U.S. but we were also able to skip the exhausting drive between one of the New York airports (Boston’s airport is conveniently close the to downtown) and Manhattan. Furthermore, even by upgrading to Business class, which ensured us enough space for our luggage as well as more comfortable seats for the 4 hours long journey, the train ride was way cheaper than a regular plane ticket. The only downside was, that it is not possible to reserve an actual seat as they are on a first-come first-served basis. Therefore we ensured to arrive early enough at the South Station in Boston.

What we did not know was that the U.S. train system did work pretty differently. Although the train was already prepared for boarding, everyone has to wait inside the station until about 15 minutes prior to the departure. Nevertheless, since we booked the Business class, we were able to catch seats on the left side in traveling direction, as there were only a few other passengers in our car at that time. Having seats on the left side significantly improves your ride from Boston to New York City as you do not only see the villages but additional get beautiful views onto the coast region and the ocean. Already early during our ride we positioned our GoPro to capture some videos of the different sceneries, from which you can see single images below showing the endless forests with the swamps, the little American villages as well as the coast regions and parts of NYC (mainly Brooklyn as Manhattan was basically the only interesting thing to see from the right side of the train). Sorry for the rather low quality of some images, but keep in mind that we were traveling at about 200 km/h, so not even the 60 fps used were good enough.

After arriving at Penn Station, we had a quick walk to the subway station where it took us literally 10 minutes to buy our 7-day passes because it did not accept the zip code of our credit card because we only have 4 digits in Switzerland (until finally someone was kind enough to tell us, that we can just type 99999). All in all, from that we have experienced during the last days already, the subway is in a really bad shape compared to Montréal or Boston and really difficult to use if you carry any luggage with you or (even more complicated) a baby buggy. Nevertheless, about 1 hour after we arrived at Penn Station, we reached our hotel in the Lower East Side and got us a drink at the rooftop bar (we can see from the One World Trade Center on one side till the Empire State Building on the other) before heading out into the New York Nights we’re we found a great little Italian restaurant.