NY Trip: Friday, August 8

So we got together with all the NY travelers this past Sunday.  Emily wanted to set a time for all of us to get together to share our photos and also create a deadline to get all our photos processed and ready to share.  It forced me to finally go through and weed out my pictures and get them online for viewing.  So the last few days of the trip are now online.  Also, I’ve added all the pictures from Todd and Kim. But guess who didn’t meet her own deadline.  *cough* Emily *cough*  [I'm expecting an angry IM message any minute now]

So if you are a fan of the Department of Redundancy Department, you can check out some new photos in the older albums to get multiple perspectives on some of the same things.

Friday was the biggest day of our trip.  We started by taking the commuter train into the city instead of driving, knowing that we’d be there so late that driving would be tough.  We ended up taking a Peak time (ie: rush-hour), which was fine, but there was a row of girls that talked a lot and loudly the whole trip.  Towards the end, a couple regulars acutally yelled at them.  It made me think of Dan’s post where he complained about the loud talkers on the Metra.

So we got into Penn station and walked up through Times Square.  Our first stop was a surprise for Emily: the M&M store.  3 floors of M&M merchandise.  Emily has extreme affection for these candies and was quite overwhelmed by the store.  She had to call her mom to tell her about it and was overheard makeing the statement: “I’m getting sweaty.”

After spending quality time in that store, we made our way over to Rockefeller Center.  Our first objective was to get tickets to the NBC Studios Tour.  Unfortunatly, all the morning tours were already sold out, so we settled for an afternoon tour and altered our schedule a little bit.

We headed outside and loitered around the Today show set, but as it was just about 10, they were ready to call it a day and we didn’t see anyone famous.

We then walked across the street to St. Pat’s Cathedral.

From there we walked downtown a bit to Grand Central Terminal.

We had lunch on the dining concourse and then went outside to meet up with a free tour of Grand Central and neighborhood.  From the description of the tour, I was excited to hear this guide.  And he was extremely knowledgeable about the city and it’s history.  Unfortunately, he injected way too many of his own opinions and made unnecessary and long-winded anecdotes.  We didn’t tour very much – we stood in place for long periods of time as he went on many rants such as how Americans like their things fake and how Walt Disney never took time to look things up (he had a lot of hate for Disney for some reason).

In between his rants we did get a few nuggets of information.  And we had an entertaining little segment on Alice in Wonderland where he selected Emily to play the role of Alice.  What it had to do with Grand Central wasn’t exactly clear, but we did get to watch Emily act.

We quit the tour shortly thereafter.  We had to get back to Rockefeller Center for our NBC Studios tour.

No cameras were allowed on the tour, but we did get to stand on the set of NBC Nightly News, right next to the MSNBC studios (we could watch the action through the glass wall).  We got a few peaks at a few other places in the building, but because the Olympics were starting up, we weren’t able to go to every place normally on the tour such as the Saturday Night Live studio.  Although, because of the Olympics, we were allowed to go on the Today Show set, which was a treat for all the ladies.  One idea early on for the trip was to get to the Today Show outdoor set early enough to see the anchors, but for time reasons, we decided not to get up that early.  Getting to walk on the set was a very good surprise substitute.

The day was surprisingly starting to get away from us, so we took the subway up to mid Central Park.  The nice thing about that was it rained while we were underground and when we came up, it was just starting to dissipate.  It didn’t take long for the sun to come out again.  We made our way into the park and navigated to Belvedere Castle.

I need to Photoshop myself into this picture because it’s one of the few group shots we took.  I guess we forgot to do that.

We then walked south.  Our intention was to walk around the area known as The Ramble, but we couldn’t exactly find a path that led out to the edge of the park and ended up rambling through it.  Fortunately, we made good decisions and quickly made our way through it.  Getting lost would have seriously cramped our tight time schedule.

We arrived to cross Bow Bridge (you know – the one you see in all the movies) and then walked up to Bethesda Terrace and Fountain.

Todd and Kate walked on ahead of us as Kate’s ankle was bothering her again.  The rest of us made a detour over to Strawberry Fields.

At the memorial to John Lennon, we ran across a very interesting homeless man who made interesting comments such as how amazing it was that it was raining and now the sun was out and shining right on the memorial.  And then he started singing some Beatles tunes.  Hence my crazy look.

We continued south down to the South East corner of Central Park and met up with Todd and Kate.  It was getting close to dinner, but Kim had a desire to see Carnegie Hall.  So we split up again.  I guess the split towards the respective subway stations wasn’t exactly even because our small group made it to view the famous music hall, catch the nearest subway, and still beat Todd and Kate to the Thai restaurant we had chosen (on the recommendation from my cousin – and it was a great choice).

We had plenty of time to relax and rest our feet during dinner.  It was a crazy day of walking.  From there we went over to Broadway to see the musical Mary Poppins.

I kinda have to agree with that sign.  It was spectacular.  Or should I say, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?  (don’t correct me on the spelling – I don’t care.)  We had nice seats – the front row of the balcony.  While we didn’t have anyone in front of us, the row was incredibly narrow.  Sara might have been the only one comfortable in that row, but there was a high railing.  Thankfully, the kind woman across the aisle told me where to find the booster seats (yea – seriously!  They have them for adults of shorter stature!)  It worked out great for Sara.

The show got out around 11, but our day wasn’t done yet.  Todd and Kate had been to NYC before and had done the Empire State building, but not at night.  And since I really didn’t want to stand in line for 3 hours like it can get during peak summer days, we decided to try the ESB at night (it is open until 2am!).  And it worked out great.  There was no extremely long line.

It was nice to see that they made some updates to the line process.  I can remember waiting in the dingy, dirty basement of the building with no air conditioning just to get tickets.  They’ve made vast improvements to the whole process.

So we got to the top and enjoyed great views of the city at night.

As it approached midnight, we realized we had to hustle to get over to Penn Station to try to make a 12:25 train.  If we missed it, we would have to wait an hour for the 1:20AM train.  Well, we were tired and got a little confused on the directions so we missed the train.  By only a couple minutes.  So we waited around for the hour and finally got on the train to get home.  It arrived at 2:45AM.

The next morning we learned on the news that there was a power outage in the ESB and some people got stuck in the elevators for 45 minutes.  I recalled how shortly after we started walking away from the building, I turned around to try to get a picture of the colorfully lighted spire from the ground, but it was all dark.  I was confused at the time, but now realized we narrowly missed being one of those people trapped.