Thursday, Day 6 - As we came off the ferry, a guy was hawking helicopter rides. I wasn’t a very hard sell and Mona was right with me.

The picture is Mona looking cool and collected as we launched on our adventure. The picture looks like she's sitting next to an open doorway, but there is a very clean window between her and all that empty space.

We paid for a 15 minute ride that would take us through Manhattan and by the Statue of Liberty. An extra $40 per person would buy an extension of 5 minutes to include Yankee Stadium. A Dutch family ended up in our group. They paid for the longer tour, so we were told to keep quiet about our 5 minute bonus.

Sadly, nine days later on a similar helicopter flying the same excursion route, a small airplane collided with it killing the nine people on the two aircraft. - Photo by Stan Ford