Sweet Summer Getaway, Part 1

This past week, the first week of our summer vacation, Mark and I were so blessed to be able to get away on a "kid-free" trip to New York City. Charlotte spent the first few days at her Grammy and Poppy's house, and then my mom and dad came into town to keep her for the remainder of the time. We were there for 6 days, so I am going to break this into two blog posts.

When we first arrived in the city, we took a cab to our hotel. Everyone kept talking about how hot it was, because it had gotten to 98 degrees that day. Even the receptionist at the hotel desk apologized for the weather. Mark and I thought it felt pretty normal! Of course, by the time we got checked in the sun was headed down and was behind the buildings, so we probably missed the worst of it. We were very pleased with our hotel. We were a little worried about how big the room would be because you always hear about how small everything is in New York. It was a great size! We were also very pleased with the location, in midtown about 5 blocks from Central Park.

After checking out the park a little bit, we headed over to FAO Schwartz. I was pleased to pose with a lego Johnny Depp as "Captain Jack Sparrow."

We had dinner and then went to check out Times Square with all of its dazzling lights at night.

On Saturday morning we got up to experience our first New York diner. We love the show "Rules of Engagement", so we sought out the diner that the one in the show is based on. In the show it is called "Island Diner" but the exterior, entrance, and building were all the same. The inside was, of course, completely different, but the food was delicious!

Then we headed south to Washington Square Park, NYU campus, and Greenwich Village. We spent a lot of time that afternoon just walking around and checking things out.

While in Greenwich Village we did seek out two famous exteriors from T.V. shows. This is the building that was shown as the outside of the apartments where Monica, Rachel, Joey, and Chandler lived. The coffee shop at the bottom is what Central Perk was based on.

Just a few blocks over was the outside of the house where the Huxtables in The Cosby Show lived.

Then we headed over to wall street and saw the New York Stock Exchange. We also were able to see ground zero and the "Freedom Tower" going up there. It is only about 1/2 way built and is huge. It is going to be pretty amazing. We found out that it is going to be 1776 feet high, to represent out independence in the year 1776.

Then we headed back up to the northwest side of Central Park. We took some walking trails, got a great view across a large pond, and saw the Great Lawn.

It was in the 80's this day and got to be quite warm. We took the subway a lot of places. The platforms were pretty miserably hot and stuffy, but luckily most of the trains were well air-conditioned.

After dinner with my friend, Katie, who moved to NYC a year ago, we saw Rockefeller Center at night. It was beautiful and bustling.

On Saturday morning, we woke up to a rainy and chilly city. In turn, we decided to head over to the Museum of Natural History. That place was huge! After about and hour and a half we had only see the first of 4 levels! I was not wanting to spend the entire day there, so we skipped the 2nd and 3rd floor and went straight to the 4th floor where all of the dinosaur paraphernalia was.

After a great lunch at Patsy's Pizzeria, we checked out the New York Public Library and Grand Central Station before we made our way to dinner and a show. We saw "Catch Me if You Can." It is fairly new to Broadway, but was wonderful! We saw it on Saturday night, and then on Sunday night was the Tony Awards. One of the two main leads won the Tony for "Best Male Lead", so that we were really happy that we had just seen it!

More to come later . . .