Our last full day in NYC......boo hoo it's Day 5

Before I start recreating the events of Day 5 in New York, I just have to say how lucky we were to get this LONG (it's long for us) vacation and get to spend all this time here.  The last day is always the saddest because you know that you have to go back home and face your real life.

But we weren't going to let the sadness of the last day get to us......we were going to go out and make it a GREAT one!

Lucky for us, we had made reservations before we came on this trip to get into some of the more popular places.  So after the morning stop to Starbucks, we headed to the 911 Museum.  We had a reservation time of 10:30.  A short subway ride got us to the museum and thanks to our reservation, we didn't have to stand in line and got right in.

One of the most somber and quiet places I've ever been.  The Museum is built on the site of one of the fallen buildings and many of the beams and concrete are part of the foundation of this Museum.

Walking around and seeing this stuff makes your hearts heavy and reminds you of that awful day.

Hopefully something like this will never happen again.

 

 

Seeing the personal effects, photos, and hearing the stories of the people that were there that day.....makes it more personal and connected to the terrible tragedy those families had to go through.

We took a couple of hours going through the Museum and by this time we were getting hungry.  We had a 3pm appointment to take the boat over to see the Statue of Liberty......so we hopped on the subway and went in search of someplace to eat.

Here's what we found:

Located in Greenwich Village (although we had no clue what area we were in)

Quiet, kinda darkish place that had lots of board games you could sit and play while you drink.  We, however, were only there for lunch.  We decided to share lunch, which we do quite often.  This way we get to try more things on the menu and don't get such big meals.  We shared spicy fried chicken served with Mac & Cheese (I am seriously on a mac & cheese kick right now) and a Cobb Salad.  While we ate, we plotted out the subway route map so that we could get back to the dock where the boat left from.  Good thing we had 1 week unlimited pass on the subway......because we really used them!

We got to the boat terminal in plenty of time and in fact, they let us get on early.  Here's the boats that take you across the river to Liberty Island.

We sat on the upper deck and the view was amazing.  The skyline.....the water.....Miss Statue of Liberty.....everything.  And once again we had another glorious day (a little cloudy) to enjoy our adventure.

The closer you got to this lovely lady.......the more pictures you wanted to take.  She stands there so regal and majestic out there.

What an awesome and incredible sight she is.

With advance reservations you can get tickets to go into the crown or into the pedestal.  I bought our tickets about 1 month before we left and got the last tickets for the pedestal on that day.  How awesome that was going to be......getting to climb into the pedestal.

But............this blog is already gone on for too long and I don't want to bore you with any more today......so I'll save our Statue of Liberty adventure for the next one!

How we finished off Day 4 in NYC

Back to our adventure.

We decided that we were going to spend the rest of the afternoon in Chinatown (we've been to Chinatowns in San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, might be another one that I can't recall at this moment).  It looked like one of the biggest Chinatown's we had ever seen and looked very interesting from the bus.  We had originally thought of going to the Brooklyn Chinatown....but decided that we wanted to be back in Manhattan.

And interesting it was.

The biggest annoyance was the old Chinese women on every street corner and in between constantly coming up to you and saying "Chanel?  Chanel?  Rolex? ".  It got irritating.  Our first mission once we got there was to find a place to eat lunch.  A nice, safe, clean place in the middle of Chinatown.  We "yelped" several close places and none of them seemed to be what we were looking for.  Just so happens that Chinatown is the neighborhood next to Little Italy.....so we chose Italian :-)

We found Forlini's......had good ratings and I can always spaghetti for lunch.  This place looked like a restaurant out of The Godfather.  The waiters working were all older men with wonderful thick Italian accents.

We feasted on an antipasto salad and some kind of pasta with Bolognese.  The bread was out of this world crazy delicious.  I could have just sat and ate bread all day.

Now that we had full bellies.....it was time to explore Chinatown.  Our mission was to get souvenirs for anybody that we felt like getting one for and I wanted a Brooklyn t-shirt.

Each and every street in this city is amazing and just so different from living here in Houston.  It's just a fascinating place to visit.

I just love being visiting here.  It's just so much hustle and bustle all the time.

Easy to spot which neighborhood is Chinatown and which is

Little Italy from the top and bottom picture

 

 

In our hunt for souvenirs......Paul bought a selfie-stick.  Seriously people.....we thought these things were really stupid, but when you travel with just 2 people......they are awesome to use.  You don't have to continually ask people to take a picture of us.  (*there's going to be a whole special blog written about selfie-sticks.....you're not going to want to miss that one)

 

Here he is trying it out:

 

 

While he was messing around with this.....I bought a NYC tote bag and a Brooklyn T-shirt....yay!

 

Some interesting things we found as we walked along:

 

 

Lots of street vendors selling things I never have seen before.

Look carefully at this picture, you'll see a tourist you might recognize in it.

(seriously, this guy just wanders off and leaves me doing my own thing)

 

Well it was about 5pm and we had big plans for the evening (one of the main reasons we

came to this city)......so we fought the crowded subways and headed back to the hotel

to shower up and change clothes.

 

We got to City Winery to see Eilen Jewell.  Our seats were awesome and we had nice people at our table to chat with. 

 

 

We decided to eat dinner later that evening because we had eaten a BIG late lunch. 

 

The concert was awesome and I really enjoyed her rockabilly/country music.  Paul had the highlight of his life when she signed his CD and he got to chat with her for a bit.

 

 

The venue was a place that made their own wine. 

 I snapped this picture when I was down in the basement using the restroom.

 

 

We snapped some pictures and had someone snap a picture of us out in front.  We were dressed so nicely -- and that doesn't happen very often.  I even had on a brand new dress (which I love), so I definitely had to record this occasion. 

(lighting not good......boo)

 

 

As we waited for the subway to take us back to our Times Square......

I had Paul snap a picture of me at the station we were at.

Our next mission was to find someplace to eat.

 

 

On our bus trip the day before, the lady who sat in front of us told us about the Stardust Diner where the waiters and waitresses sing.  Sounded like something cool and different.....so off we went to find this restaurant.

 

 

We had no idea it was going to take us so long to find the place (dumb GPS kept giving us different directions), so it was about 11:30pm when we went in to eat.  We ended up splitting a Patty Melt and some cole slaw.  Too late.....didn't want to eat a big meal at this time of the night.

 

 

I happened to have the lucky seat where the singing waitstaff would walk along the ledge behind me.  Gave me a good view.  The singing was amazing.  They have to audition to get their job and they are all actually aspuiring singers/dancers/actors who are looking for their big break on Broadway.  Was a fun place to eat at!

 

After eating......it was getting a bit late, so we jumped on the subway and headed back to our hotel.  Tomorrow would be our last full day here in the city and we already had reservations for a couple of things to do the next day.......it was going to be another long and busy one! 

 

Remembering Day 4 in New York City

Need to get the rest of this trip documented.  Still have the Santa Fe trip to get here too.  I just take too many darn pictures when we travel.  No......I LOVE to have the memories and look at them again.

Things are tough right now.  Paul is working about 100 hours a week.  We are short staffed.  Too many new staff.  People just quitting without notice.  All the great people quit to go to college.  Business is booming.  (*not ever going to complain about business booming).  This all means that I'm going to have to start working in the store on nights again.  *I was just beginning to feel like I was making a dent on my work and getting caught up......something always comes along to screw that up.

Well anyways.......our life was fun and glamouress during the summer.....now we're back to the reality of our slave driving job.  So to get me out of this funk......I'm going to remember Day 4 on our fabulous NYC vacation.

Day 4 began rainy and gloomy.  Darn it......well I guess you can't have great weather everyday.  The only problem with the bad weather today was that we were planning on going to Coney Island!

We grabbed some coffee for the husband and jumped on the subway.  It was going to take a little over an hour by subway to get there.

It was gray, cloudy, and we could see rain clouds in the distance......but we didn't care -- we were on vacation!

Here was our very first view of Coney Island from the subway window.  As you can see, it was a dark and gloomy day.

A view from a train :-)

 

Well at least with weather like this......there's not a lot of crowds!

Had to have a souvenir shot of the subway station at Coney Island!

 

The moment we pulled into the station, the skies opened up and started pouring.  By the time we had visited the restrooms and strolled out to the street......it stopped long enough for us to stroll around and get some pictures of this awesome place!

 

Well we had just missed the hot dog eating contest by a few days

While visiting Coney Island.....we discovered the smallest pizza shop ever.   His whole little shop, including wood fired oven, was that little cart.

There was a few die hard beach lovers enjoying this awesomely gray and cloudy day

We walked along the nice colorful Coney Island boardwalk.  No visit to the beach is complete without a stroll up and down the boardwalk.

Interesting name for a restaurant?!?!?!?!

Those of you who have seen the movie BIG will know exactly who this is!

 

We walked around a little and then made the executive decision to head back to Manhattan.  The weather wasn't exactly conducive to visiting the beach.  Just as we entered the subway station to head back.......it started pouring again.  (Thank you weather gods for allowing us to walk around here and enjoy a short visit to Coney Island).

 

As we rode the subway back to Manhattan......we were putting our brains together to think of what our next adventure was going to be.  We had no plans and it was only 1 in the afternoon.  What did we do?  Guess you'll just have to check back tomorrow (or the next day to see what we did).

It's still Day 3 in NYC.....but this is part 2!

Okay....I had to go and read the post before this one to figure out where to begin.  I try to be as accurate in the chain of events as possible.  It's called "trying to keep my brain active" at my old age.

Okay, well just in case you didn't read the last post to see where we left off.....let me refresh your memory.  We just got done eating a crappy lunch..............

After checking our subway maps......we headed back to a stop for the bus tour.  Lucky for us we had "jump off - jump on" tickets for 2 days, which meant we could hop on the bus at any stop as much as we wanted for 2 days.  Since we had done the downtown and the uptown tour the day before, we wanted to take advantage of the Brooklyn tour.  We had never been to Brooklyn before.

We got to the stop and found a LONG line of people waiting for the last bus to Brooklyn.  What a big disappointment it was to find out the bus was full 4 people ahead of us.....boo.

But wait........the bus company did an amazing thing and the next bus that pulled up to that stop they designated as the Brooklyn bus tour since there was still a few of us left in line.  It was actually better to have missed that first bus.......because our tour guide was AWESOME and the bus was hardly crowded.  Yippee......off to Brooklyn we go!

The bus driver chose the George Washington Bridge to get to Brooklyn. 

We did get a good picture of the Brooklyn Bridge in the top picture and also in this bottom picture!

No time to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on this trip......but there will always be a next time.

A nice park in the middle of Brooklyn

Since this was not a regular route for our bus driver, he got a little lost.  Bad for him maybe.....but for us, it was a treasure trove of awesome pictures.    Such as the skyline of Manhattan from Brooklyn!

After we drove around Brooklyn for about an hour.....the bus headed back to Manhattan.  It was supposed to let us off at the original bus stop, but they decided we could ride back to Times Square if we wanted to stay on.  We elected to stay on because it was a lot closer to where we wanted to be.  The rest of these shots are just random shots we got on our way back.

 

Fountain at Bowling Green Park

Riding on the top of a double decker bus puts you really close to traffic signals.  I snapped this as we were stuck in gridlock traffic.

This one too!

 

 

A picture of the Freedom Tower as we were turning down the street. 

This is an AWESOME picture of it!

 

Since we were stuck in 5pm traffic in the middle of New York City.....a just leaned my arm out and snapped a picture of all the gridlock!

After arriving back in Times Square, we hurried around to the last minute ticket booth to find something to entertain ourselves for the evening.

Due to time limits (and the fact that we didn't have time to go back to the hotel room to change clothes).....we chose an Off Broadway play called Drunk Shakespeare.

We had hurridly read some review about this show, but really had no idea for what we were in for.  We had a little bit of time to kill and it was hot.....so we grabbed some yummy delicious yogurt and just walked around Times Square enjoying ourselves before the show. 

The theater was a little off the beaten path and after a dark elevator ride to the 4th floor of an old building.....we arrived at our venue!

We have to say that the seating was definitely different than most plays we've attended.  We were seated in various types of furniture around what looks like a library.

The bar service was awesome.  Just write it on a paper and put it on a little stick on your table and someone comes and gets it and brings you your drink.....our choice this evening was Corona.

They had this interesting throne at the front of the room, which turned out to be a special seat if you were willing to bid on it.  I'm not sure what my husband was thinking when he started bidding, but thank goodness.....he didn't win.  If you sat here you had free drinks, but also a more important role in the show.

The show was hilarious, different, and had lots of audience participation.  The main premise from the title is that they did a Shakespeare show, but one member of the cast (chosen randomly) had to drink shots throughout the night......which not only made them a little wasted, but also even more funny when reciting their lines.

A cast picture after the show will clearly show you who the DRUNK person of the cast was that evening.  It was fun and it was different.

After the show, it was time to grab some dinner.  We had been given free tickets to a comedy show later that evening which was also happening at the same place we had just seen the play.

But first we needed some grub.  Our pick was The Glass House Tavern.  I feasted on baked truffle mac and cheese with bacon......OMG!!!  I was so busy enjoying the best mac and cheese I had ever had in my life and didn't notice what Paul ordered.  I think he had some sandwich with sweet potato fries.

After our quick dinner, we headed to the comedy show where we laughed our butts off at people insulting us and the rest of the people in the crowd.  It was really really funny.  The show let out about midnight and we headed to ........ TIMES SQUARE of course.  This is where all the fun is at this time of the night.

The biggest crowd attractor (except for the girls with no shirts that painted their naked boobs and tried to get big tips from drunk men and little boys) was the Revlon giant TV which took pictures of the crowd.  We hung out here a couple of times and just like the rest of the tourists we took our group picture when we saw ourselves.  If you look close.....you might see us (I guarantee you that we are part of this crowd)

I had to take a picture of my awesome husband with Times Square in the background!

 

And of course, you never take just one picture......you always take two!

We finally decided to call it a night and headed for the hotel.  Us old folks just couldn't keep up and decided to call it a night around 1am.  After all.........we still had another huge fun filled day ahead of us.