Our Travel Blog: New York, New York

After a quiet last day in LA (a sleep in, some shopping, a quick trip to Universal and drinks in the bar), we headed off to the airport to catch our red eye flight to New York. The idea of the overnight flight was to get some sleep, but the plane had free wi-fi so that ruined that! With very little sleep we arrived into a very white New York. There was snow everywhere!

Day 1
There was also a lot more people in New York than we expected (not that we really knew what to expect before we got here!). So on our first day in New York we did a lot of waiting. There was 1 1/2 hours at JFK waiting for our bags, almost an hour waiting in Planet Hollywood for our attraction passes, and over a two hour wait to go up the Empire State Building. Needless to say after having very little sleep the night before we were all very tired at this stage! We headed back to our hotel (The Waldorf Astoria) and after a quick refresh it was pretty much dinner time so we all (except Mick who had fallen asleep) ventured out in a different direction in search of food! We ended up a few blocks away at the "Pig n Whistle" pub where we had a really good meal! The boys were happy too as there were about 5 tv's each showing a different sport. By the time we finished dinner it was almost 10pm (and freezing) but we decided to push on and headed uptown to see what we could find. We came across Bloomingdales (which we went into mainly to defrost) and then continued on until we came across Central Park. It was amazing! The park was completely covered in snow, the lakes were frozen and there were heaps of ice skaters out on Wollman Rink. We spent ages in there just taking it all in before heading back to the hotel to bed.

Day 2
Today we were up and at it pretty early and took the subway uptown. First stop was the American Natural History Museum - which was massive and pretty cool. The Museum was straight across the road from Central Park so instead of waiting for a bus we decided to walk across instead. As with the night before - we had a great time just wandering through, throwing snow at each other and slipping around on the ice. We ended up on the other side of the park at 5th Avenue. We went and grabbed some late lunch, before Bel and Jo did a little bit of shopping and then headed back to the hotel. After getting pretty Bel and Jo headed out to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas Spectacular (and it was "Spectacular"!). We then all met up and headed across to Times Square where we did Madame Tussaud's and checked out the lights of Times Square at night. After grabbing some late dinner we then headed up to the Top of the Rock to get some pictures of the city at night.

Day 3 - New Years Eve
This morning we headed across to Rockefeller Plaza and saw a bit of the NBC Today Show. We then headed downtown to Battery Park to go and see the Statue of Liberty. We caught the bus down, which took us along the Hudson River and past the Ground Zero site (where the new buildings are currently being constructed). We arrived at Battery Park to catch the ferry to Statue of Liberty but quickly changed our minds when we saw the length of the line (there was a good chance we were going to be waiting about 3 hours to get on a ferry). Everyone in New York must have thought today was a good day to go! We decided to take a round trip on the (free) Staten Island ferry instead which goes past the statue anyway and will head back down over the next couple of days to try again! We also wandered up to Wall Street and checked out the financial district. We then caught the bus back uptown through Chinatown and the lower east side before heading back to the hotel for some lunch and a rest. This afternoon we did the NBC Studio Tour and then we were off to Ruby Tuesday's for our New Year's Eve celebrations (with 1 million other people in New York). There were predicted to be over a million people in Times Square to watch the ball drop but getting there was pretty painless (even through about 5 police barriers). I think everyone will say that this night was the best of our trip so far and not one any of us are going to forget anytime soon. The atmosphere at midnight when the ball dropped was just awesome!

Here are some photos from our first three days in NY:

At the airport