This is the first of two posts on the Pope Francis’s visit to New York City in September, 2015. Part 2 can be found here.

As soon as my wife heard that NY City was offering tickets by lottery to see Pope Francis in Central Park she put her name in. She wasn’t expecting much so it was a pleasant surprise for her when she received a email informing her that she was to receive two tickets. Not being all that religious at first I wasn’t going to go, but then I eventually decided that I couldn’t let her go alone – and I thought “who knows? It might be interesting”. So we took the train down to Grand Central, the Shuttle across to Times Square and the Broadway Local to Columbus Circle. All told this part of the journey took us about two hours.

When we came out of the subway at Columbus Circle we we directed North to 62nd street and then east. Things started to slow down as we reached Central Park West. The line went down to 60th, then turned up to 66th and then turned back down to 60th where we reached security. A solid mass of people spanning about fourteen blocks. This part of the journey took about four hours.

Our tickets said that if we weren’t at security by 3:30pm we weren’t going to get in. We reached that point about two and a quarter hours into our four hour wait. At that point I was wondering if this was the only Pope we were going to see. Thankfully the 3:30pm deadline seems to have been meaningless because we didn’t actually get there until around 5:00pm and there were still lots of people behind us.