A Garden of Weeds: Trip to New York City

For our 5th anniversary Seth and I took a weekend trip to New York City by ourselves. I was really excited to take a trip just him and I since the last real vacation that we took was our honeymoon. The weekend in April 2010 down to South Carolina doesn't count because we were down there for a friends wedding so its not like we were doing a bunch of site seeing or much relaxing either. Anyway, I dropped the kids off at daycare and Aiden was easy, but I did get a little emotional after dropping Rebecca off because this was the first time that I was leaving her with someone. I hadn't spent a night away from her before. I knew that she was in good hands with Seth's parents, but you can't help but want to run back in ans scoop them up. However this trip was something that we needed. Not that there was anything that we needed to work on, but there is only so much that a simple once a month date night can do and we wanted to have real us time without having to watch the clock to see when one of the kids would be up.

So we set off on Friday morning. Initially we were going to take the Accela train down so that we could just relax while traveling, but when I looked at ticket prices, to not sit in the sardine section a round trip ticket for both of us was like buying a plane ticket so we decided to just drive and save the money for when we were in the city. Between parking and gas up and back we saved a little more then 50% the cost of train tickets. Once we got down there we checked into our Hotel- The Hilton Garden Inn in Times Squares. That night we had dinner at Ruby Foos. I had read about this restaurant and it received good reviews for sushi. The sushi was good, but honestly the sushi that we get here at home was better, in my opinion. After dinner we had some time to kill so we walked a little around Times Square. Went to the M&M store. Bought Aiden some ridiculously priced m&m's. Then we went over to the Disney Store and bought the kids NYC Mickey shirts. Then it was time to head over to the Gershwin Theater where we had tickets to see the musical "Wicked". I had been dying to see the show and when it comes to Boston its only for a few weeks. We both really enjoyed the show. We did contemplate going over to Empire State Building afterwards, but since we got to the city later then we expected we were too tired so we called it a night.

At the M&M Store

Stage set Up for Wicked

St Patrick Cathedral, but we didn't go in there since they weren't doing tours the weekend we were in the City

Just some of the interesting things you will see walking around town.

Saturday morning was iconic. Going for a run in Central Park. It wasn't too bad. We did 2 laps of the smaller loop that is just under 1.5miles around. The walk to and from the hotel was a nice warm up and cool down since it was about 8-10 blocks (.7mi). We grabbed lunch at Edison Cafe, which was slated to be a really good deli place in the Edison Hotel. Did not disappoint and the portions were very generous. After lunch we hopped in a cab and headed over to the Ground Zero Memorial. I was able to secure visitor passes for us after stalking their website for 3wks in hopes that a time slot that worked for us opened up. Though not quite finished its still impressive and ominous. The pools are just amazing and in the middle where the water drops down kind of gives you the chills because it appears as if its just going into a never ending void. The museum doesn't open up until September so we couldn't go in that so really the only thing the see are the foundation pools and some of the landscaping...unless your there to visit someone.. :-(

South Tower Pool. Museum in the background

Tower 1

Survivor tree. After all the wreckage this tree lived through it all to grow again. It gives a lot of people hope just to touch it.

Fireman Helmet

Piece of Mangles aluminum.

That night we had dinner at the Water Club for our anniversary. The place was really nice on the water. we could see one of the bridges from our table. It was nice to have a relaxing dinner where we were not in a rush to finish before the kids started to get antsy. The food was pretty good.Wasn't the most amazing meal I have had, but still a good dinner. Really tenders steak. Lobster bisque was really good. Made me want to make some at home and freeze it in servings. After dinner we had thought about going to see the Empire State building (yet again), but we had a pretty full day already and starting to feel like old fogies, we were tired and just wanted to relax.

Sunday, we went back to Central park. Seth went for a 10K run (pretty much the whole loop of the park) and I walked around and took pictures.

Trump Tower

This section is called "The Mall" as seen in many movies.

Grapevines

After the park we packed up all our belongs form check out and then headed over to the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier. Its an old World War II carrier, that had been updated for the Korean War and then was decommissioned. They gutted the main floor of the ship and converted it to a museum. There were a lot of things to see. part of the ticket was going aboard one of the submarines, but the line was long and also the space shuttle was there, but that was not slated to be open to the public until the end of July. You could see the back of the shuttle, but that was it. On the main deck of the boat there were various military planes and helicopters. It was pretty hot up there that day, so after that we grabbed some lunch and headed back home.