Family Vacation-Seeing the Sights of NYC

Day two in NYC (June 26th) started sooo early. We had to leave our hotel at like 4 am to go to Live with Regis and Kelly. Guess what? They cancelled it because of construction! I have bad luck with live TV show tapings. I went to The Price is right for my 18th birthday and they cancelled that because Bob broke his wrist but I digress…. We took a commuter train from New Jersey straight to Penn Station and then we took the subway to the Lincoln Center Station.

Guess what we saw right when we came up out of the subway? The Manhattan temple! We were kind of winging things a lot of our trip so we found a lot of surprises along the way. It is a beautiful sight in the middle of such a busy city and a lovely coincidence that it is right down the street from ABC Studios.

We didn’t really have any other plans for the day so we just walked down the street to Central Park and took a nice morning stroll. We happened upon Tavern on the Green (that ritzy restaurant in Central Park) and my mom decided that we should just give ourselves a tour. It was a pretty little place but a bit over the top if you ask me. When we came out we were just about to take pictures by the Tavern on the Green sign when the cutest little police golf cart-ish thing showed up. We all pretended to be arrested by the officer and took some fun pictures.

After that we had breakfast at McDonalds. I feel like we ate there at least once a day the whole trip and by the end of the trip I never wanted to see another McDonalds for the rest of my life! I have since gotten over that and I’m back to enjoying Mickey Ds as usual but if we had gone one more time on the trip I don’t think that would have been possible.

Anyway, after breakfast we went down to Times Square. It’s fun to say I’ve been there but I honestly didn’t think it was that great. The best part was that we were right by Macy’s! That is the hugest store I have ever been in! It was 7 floors and each floor was ginormous! I did a lot of looking but no buying. We decided to head over to the Empire State building and to my great surprise we ran straight into Forever 21 aka my favorite store in the world. Luckily we were in a hurry or my checking account wouldn’t have ever recovered! I only got 3 shirts, 1 wallet and 3 pairs of earrings. Believe it or not that is really good for me when it comes to Forever 21. What can I say? I only had about 10 minutes to cover the whole store.

My dad took off when we got to the Empire State building (I think he went in search of another McDonalds) and we did the touristy stuff. Again, it is cool to say I’ve been there but it’s not really all it’s cracked up to be. On this trip I decided that the most popular things are pretty overrated and that I enjoy the fun little surprises a lot more.

We were sooo hungry when we finished our tour and we decided that we wanted to try genuine New York pizza. We found a little place near Central Park and it was sooo yummy. We had salad, pizza and cheesecake and I could have kept eating FOREVER! We had some time to kill before our Broadway show so we went back to Central Park. Jessica and Katie had tons of fun pretending to hail cabs and we all had fun people watching for awhile before heading down to Broadway.

Broadway was all lit up and it was so much fun to see a play in New York! We saw Mary Poppins and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t my first choice. I really wanted to see Phantom of the Opera, Les Mes or The Lion King but Mary Poppins ended up being really good. I only fell asleep for a few minutes. Oops! It was a long day but a great day. I couldn’t have asked for more fun in the Big Apple!

Just as a side note my mom loves to videotape the most random things. I took this picture of her while she was recording a carousel type thing go round and round and round for at least 5 minutes. It was pretty funny. Well, at least for me.