New York City day 1...

Last weekend we went to New York City!! It was a spontaneous trip, we have discussed going to New York, but never seemed to have the right time to go, but Friday night we came home from the movies at 12:30 and looked up the weather for New York, the forecast had changed from thunderstorms all weekend to partly cloudy with much less rain, so at 1 am we decided to make plans to go on Saturday! We slept about four hours, hopped on the metro to catch a bus at 7:45 Saturday morning, spent 4 hours on the bus and arrived in New York at noon. It was so exciting and scary at the same time. To be dropped off at Penn station in the middle of a huge city you know nothing about. Strapped with a backpack of the bare necessities for an overnight trip and a couple of neceassary maps printed from google and we were off.

At first we were overwhelmed and I was a little scared, first things first we had to get our bearings of our location so that we could find our way back to our bus on Sunday night without getting lost. So we walked around the block once to figure out our directions. If worse comes to worse though we figure we can always just hop in a cab and say take me to Penn station, right?

So now we have some idea of general cardinal directions, we're off into the dizzying chaos of New York. Matt has visited New York, but I have not so it was a new experience for me. I have been to London and Paris, so I have been in a big city but that was with a guided tour. Walking in New York is actually much less scary than in London, in New York, pedestrians still seem to have the right away at least. I definitely did not feel that way in London.

I kept getting so distracted by all the architecture and buildings I recognized from movies or art, it felt good recognizing places. We started to gain confidence in that familiarity. The New Yorker, then the Empire State building and so on...


Lunch, New York Pizza, yummy!

Luckily we found our hotel soon after lunch and they let us check in early, so we didn't have to carry our backpack all afternoon. That was nice because we ended up doing a lot of walking, our goal was to find central park and everything in between, which we successfully conquered.

We went into NBC studios, didn't really do the tour, but in their store we found the best thing ever! I don't know if there are any Battlestar Gallactica fans out there, but I had to call Jess Barnes from the store to tell her about the cute baby onsie I found, "100% baby cylon"! Oh I loved and googled over it for a while, I resisted as I couldn't think of any BSG fans with babies and I wasn't close to having my own cylon baby... drats. But I will find that onsie again when the time is right! And we will have ourselves a most beloved cylon baby.

Rockefellar Plaza!

We trotted a few blocks over to Times Square and the Theatre district. We wanted to check out about tickets to a show. Friends at work told me about TKTS where you can get discounted tickets, however at 4pm the line stretches forever! We didn't end up going to a show, but with such short notice we weren't really expecting to. We needed to rest up for our next big day and really hadn't slept much the night before, so we moved on.

Here we found Central Park!! We breathed a sigh of relief as we walked into the park. After walking about 30 blocks of intense city it was very relaxing to find some green space and a more tranquil environment. It was still a very busy place but I was feeling very claustrophobic from the city streets. This is when I realized I could never live here and don't know that I could really take much more than a few days here! It is loud, busy, and dirty. The air feels suffocating and you feel grimy just from walking down the street. Thank goodness for central park, I don't know that anyone could live here without this haven. And boy is it well used!

I loved this stone staircase! (I love the man standing on it more though)

This was kind of fun, a group just brought out a bunch of hula hoops to share!

We tried, but I seem to remember it being a lot easier when I was a kid??

I was not any good. Matt wasn't any better.

It is fun to be in this great park and look over to see the city skyline right on the edge.

In this picture below the couple are doing some type of yoga or something. I just liked the picture and surroundings.

There seems to be street shows everywhere in New York along with street vendors. We saw a group just dancing in the street in central park, the exception was all the dancers were on roller skates. Here a couple guys were just amusing the crowd and probably trying to accept money for it. Down by the statue of liberty we saw some guys dressed in neon orange trying to wrangle a crowd, oh and the woman dressed up at the statue of liberty just standing on a pedestal??

This is overlooking one of the smaller ponds in Central Park, the park is just huge and we didn't even get through half of it!

This was on our way back through times square.


I liked this statue of a button and sewing needle, we were in the fashion district.

On our way back to the hotel we picked up some fabulous sandwiches and NY cheesecake for a picnic and some much needed rest after our 5 or 6 mile jaunt. We were a little cautious walking the streets at night so we just hung out at our hotel, there was a nice bar there, so we had a couple of drinks and enjoyed some R&R!