Onto the real fun... New York City!!! In January I decided I wanted to come visit Shane in Baltimore for Spring Break, and when we started discussing stuff we wanted to do NYC came up. After some planning we decided we would take a weekend trip with another couple Shane works with... so we spent 48 hours in the beautiful city and had a great time. I will also say that every single stereotypical situation you can think of when you think NYC... ya, it's true.
So we drove in Friday night to a bright and vibrant city. I can't even describe the driving situation once we hit the city. If I had one word it would be RIDICULOUS (yes, in all caps..). I thought within the first 20 minutes I would have seen 20 wrecks, but somehow we made it in one piece to our hotel. By this point we just decided to walk and find a local bar to have a drink and hang out before a big day seeing the sites Saturday. This was when my favorite stereotypical NYC moment happened... we're walking, we hear sirens, next thing you know a cop car is screeching around the corner directly in front of us at about 35mph and by the time we can turn our heads the car is off in the distance...I was jaw dropped and literally just laughed and thought I had just witnessed a shot from some movie. Anyways, the first bar we came to looked good, so after getting our ideas checked for a good 2 minutes we find a seat and find out we miraculously walked into the bar that happened to be "taste testing" some new vodka in a special drink that night. So we got free drinks.. they were disgusting.. but we drank them anyways. After the drink of nasty I decided a beer was in order, and was pleasantly surprised to see they had Amstel Light on tap. A few drinks, another bar and a few appetizers later it was getting late and we decided to call it a night.
Saturday was our big tourist day. We headed north from our hotel to see all the sights. Off the top of my head we saw The Empire State Building (which I'm still not sure what they do in there..), The New York Public Library (YES...the location where Carrie and Big were supposed to get married int he first SATC!), Times Square, Hershey's Great American Chocolate Company (with a whole reese's section!), Central Park (it's really that big..), Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, Saks and Co. on Fifth Avenue (10 stories... an entire story of SHOES!), Saint Patrick's Cathedral (huge and beautiful)... and probably a few I forgot to mention (pics below). We also had a lovely slice of pizza for lunch and ended the afternoon at Tequilaville (because if you walked by Tequilaville you would walk in too...I got a cosmo...).
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| Empire State Building |
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| NYC Public Library |
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| Central Park |
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| Times Square |
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| Rockefeller Center |
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| Saks and Co!! |
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| SHOES!! |
Also, random thought.. I'm pretty sure NYC contains the most Starbucks in a 10 mile radius... literally... some buildings had one on each end. Also, if you see Elmo and Mickey on the corner and they are taking pictures... they will chase you and say "money.. money.. .money" AFTER you take your picture. Needless to say we ran in the other direction before getting shot by Elmo.
Saturday night we had gotten discounted dinner vouchers to a pretty nice restaurant that consisted of a 3 course meal and a glass of wine per couple. It was decent... nothing I would brag about. My favorite part was figuring out that the wine they gave us was 8 and 10 dollar wine that would have cost us $40/bottle had we bought it off the wine list (the cheapest wine they had too). We had intentions of trying to get tickets to a Broadway show that night, but come to find out those things are expensive! Instead we, okay I, had found a comedy club that wasn't too pricey and decided that would be fun for the night... come to find out 2 dollar drink minimum means you'll be charged an arm and a leg.. and when they say improve and it only costs you $15 you probably won't get too many laughs. It had its highs, but definitely had a few more lows. All in all it was a pretty entertaining evening. We also got to experience our first two cab rides.... yes, just as stereotypical as you would imagine. Middle Eastern men driving you to classical music zipping in and out of lanes and coming with in inches of hitting a pedestrian, biker or another car.... and no, even though every time we hailed a cab I looked for the vans... we did not get into the cash cab. Unfortunate.
Sunday was our day to venture South. We walked down and saw ground zero (or the plans for what it will look like and the construction in progress.. the entire place is all fenced in so you can't really see much of anything) and got our pictures taken with some NYPD officers. We also saw Wall St and all that was around there. It was fun, but the big fun I was looking forward to was getting to drive over and get on the ferry to see Lady Liberty and Ellis Island..... yaaaa...... story below.
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| Ground Zero |
So after taking another entertaining cab ride back to our hotel and picking up our car, we headed over to lady liberty. After arriving we find out that we only have time to take the ferry to one of the islands... and the tickets to go up into the lady's head are sold out (aka lesson learned was to pre plan/arrive early). Anyways, we were fine with that because we noticed that you could drive around and get pretty close to her and we figured we would also get pictures on Ellis Island.... so we got tickets to catch the ferry to Ellis Island. The Ferry left at 3:30, we had 45 minutes and my smart self thought we had plenty of time to run and take some pictures and get back.....
We get to the other side of the park, take a few pictures, walk around, get back in the car. At this point Shane is kind of worried that we are cutting it close. I tell him he's freaking out and we have plenty of time.... We get back, and come to find out you had to go through "airport style" security before boarding the ferry (NO, the man that sold us our tickets did not tell us this as the woman that told us we were screwed because security stopped at 3:25 told us he should have). So we had a chuckle, went and got our tickets refunded, and decided we would all end up back in NYC at some point and now know how to plan the lady liberty/ellis island adventure. Oh, and side note... apparently the only way to get a picture of the Lady's front side is to take it from the city. So the only pictures we got are from her back side. All we could do was laugh.
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| She does have a lovely backside... |
All in all it was a really fun trip. I definitely enjoyed seeing the city and am sure I'll be back at some point.
