In the interest of time...I will now give the briefest description possible of my trip with pictures included of course!
We stayed at the Marriott in Times Square.
Apparantly there is some famous "naked cowboy" - I have never heard of him but I seem to be the only one. One of the things on the to-do list was to find him - we didn't have to look far at all - he was right outside our hotel.
After our small brush with fame we headed out for a little place to eat called, Salt. It was so small but yet so cute. I loved it. Not like anything around here. The seating was weird to me, because things are so small they have to make the most of their space so they dont have a lot of individual tables - it is community seating. Kinda cool but kinda awkward. The food though - was amazing!!After dinner, we headed back to Times Square to check out more sights. I will never forget the magical NY moment. There we were walking down the street and we rounded the corner and there it was...lit up in all her magical glory...The Christmas Tree. My eyes did indeed get a little watery...I couldn't believe that I was actually seeing it in person. I made it. I was in NYC at Christmas time!!!
From there we went and checked out the ice skating rink. It was just as it appears on tv and I was told ahead of time you wait in line for 2 hrs for 15 minutes of skating time, but I didn't care - I was determined to do it. I got there, I checked it out, I saw the line and I passed. It was crazy. I was over it but I am glad I got to see it.Any 30 Rock fans?! Look where we are!!
Look at this next picture, look in the middle, look at the lit up letter "S" and right above it, do you see it?! That's the New Year's Eve ball! Holla!
Before we headed back to the hotel, we hit up Magnolia's Bakery for some cupcakes and hot chocolate!That was how we spent our Friday in NYC. The place was all I expected and hoped it would be. The buildings are super tall, the streets had people out all night long, the horns honking, the funky smells, the random Christmas decor...I loved it, I loved it all. (here are some of my pics of just the buildings I found interesting and the Christmas decor that made me smile)
Saturday morning we got up, got ready and headed out to breakfast. We figured if we ate a big breakfast we could eat food from the vendors on the streets - I really wanted to eat a hot dog from a street vendor - I do not have a love for hot dogs it just seemed like a very New York thing to do. We ended up at a restaurant right outside our hotel called, Juniors.After we had full bellies we headed over to the theatre showing "Wicked" because we learned the night before that 2 1/2 hrs before each Wicked performance you can stand in line for 30 minutes and then they will pick 13 names out of a basket and you get to buy 2 tickets in the first 2 rows for only $26.25. Score. There were 3 of us so we thought we had pretty good odds. Everyone we made friends with in line got picked but sadly, we did not. We left and thought oh well, we will try again tonight.
We decided to head over to Central Park and check it out along with the street fair going on. We really wanted to take a carriage ride through the park but the line was 2 hours long and was only a 20 minute ride so we took the rickshaw option which was an hour long, no wait and you got to stop at a few places and take pictures.
Here is our shy, very kind but super soft spoken driver. Along the ride he would point out places in the park that have been in very popular movies, I asked him if that was the lake in the movie Enemy of the State that Will Smith rows on...he didn't know what I was talking about and confessed that all the places he was showing us, he hadn't actually seen the whole movies, the company makes them watch certain clips so they can tell customers about it - I thought that was funny.
Riding through Central Park was really fun. I loved watching all the people who were running through there and wished I could join them for a couple of miles. I saw my first Holly Berry Tree - I kept meaning to take a picture of one but never did.
As we are riding through the park we start to see a few people dressed as Santas, then we start to see a few more, then we see...
Apparently we were in the middle of the final stop for a Santa Bar Crawl which had been going on for several hours with all these Santas going from bar to bar and drinking. It was quite a sight and quite funny. Then one Santa would shout, "Santas on the move" and then a dozen of them would follow and they would be off to the next location. At one point, a few of the Santas decided to take over the rickshaw and proceeded to jump on it, sing and dance - we were half loving it - half scared.The bridge where Spiderman broke up with his girlfriend in Spiderman 3.
The tunnel in Enchanted.
Just us!
Towards the end of the park tour we stopped at the "Imagine" memorial for John Lennon who had been dead for 30 years that week.
For all of our kids at home, we took a picture of the museum in the movie, Night at the Museum.
One of the Trump Towers, yes, I watch the show Apprentice :)
After that we headed over to the MET.
Right before we went into the MET we stopped and got a pretzel from a street guy - seriously best pretzel I have ever had, hands down!! The MET is huge and you could spend all day there but we only went to a few exhibits, hit up the cafe for a coke (which I smuggled around the museum under my vest) and then we decided to leave and come back again another day (which we never did find time to come back again).
After the MET we headed back to the Wicked lottery where again we lost but everyone we made friends with in line won. We decided it was time for dinner and headed out to a place called the House Restaurant. Again, tiny little place, totally adorable and deliciously yummy!
After dinner we headed back to Time Square to check out some more things. Along our walk we discovered that we weren't very far from the Empire State building so we needed to go up there and check it out. It was 11pm and Alison was sure it was closed, but we called and much to our surprise and luck it was open until 2am! At that point we were standing outside of H&M so we headed inside to warm up for a minute and do an hours worth of shopping. Needless to say, our kids at home scored big time. After that it was off to the top of the building!Along our route we found the giant Macy's store - you know - where they have the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade....I pretended I was in the parade in my head for a moment and then took a few shots.
We're glad we didn't get to the Empire State building until midnight because we only waited about 30 minutes until we got to the top of it. If we would have come during the day, the wait is a good 2 hours long. Yikes!Yes this is the place where Buddy the Elf just wants to pass the security guards to see his dad!
On the way up our ears kept popping - so we would pop them...Alison on the other hand makes a crazy ear popping face
The weather the whole time while were there was perfect. We needed our gloves all the time but one day I even wore a short sleeved shirt with only a jacket over top of it - it rained part of the day one day and that was it! Perfect, "warm" weather - no complaints. The top of the Empire State building though, that changed everything. It was freaking freezing!!
The top of the building
Looking down on Macy's
the Hudson where the plane landed almost a year ago
Alison decided she was done with being outside so she went in to warm up...
We stayed outside to get crazy hair pictures...we were "lizzing" (30 Rock definition - look it up) - and thinking everything was hilarious because it is now 1am.
On our way back to the hotel we finally found some store windows all done up for Christmas.
We finally made it to bed that night about 2:30am. It was a great day and before I forget it was our 2nd day of using the taxis and the subway!
to be continued....
