Lee and I have been tossing around ideas for a vacation that wasn’t partially a visit with family for a couple years now, and finally decided to actually do it in April. We ended up doing something completely different than we originally set out to do, but it was such a nice trip! Lee has been pretty busy at work, so we decided we wanted to go do some fun touristy things in a big city, but we also needed to take at least a few days of completely unplugged time. We ended up spending 3 days in NYC and then taking a cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda. We had such a good time!
We caught a 6am flight on Wednesday to Newark, which went surprisingly well. Last time we had a flight that early, (coincidentally the last time we went to NYC…) we woke up at the time we were supposed to leave for the airport. We ended up getting there after check-in was closed and we had to gate check our giant bags. This time, Lee’s brother picked us up about 4:15am, and we were actually awake and almost ready when he got here! Anyway, we flew into Newark and pretty much hit the ground running. Lee posted a whole bunch of pictures to Flickr, but here are a few of my faves!
We went from the airport to the hotel and then straight to the Ed Sullivan Theater to try into to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I was able to get reserved tickets to a couple late night shows before we left, but all those do is guarantee you a spot to wait in line and see if you can get actual tickets. Anyway, we got there in plenty of time and were able to get in. Lee watches Colbert pretty frequently (I’m usually asleep… on the couch… by that point in the evening) and the show was a lot of fun! It was cool to see some of the behind the scenes action. After we finished with all of that, we pretty much ate dinner and crashed. 3:45am is an early morning!
On Thursday, we got a little bit of a slow start, but we had a pretty busy day once it got going! We started by walking the Highline North to South. Last time we were there, we walked a good part of it, but it was like 30 degrees and miserable. So this time, we took our time and made our way down to Chelsea Market. We walked around there for a little while and ate lunch. I had a pie, Lee had a Japanese burrito bowl, and then we split some mini donuts. All very yummy!
From there, we headed back Uptown to stand in line to see if we could get into the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. We were able to get into that one too, and I think I actually enjoyed it more! The audience was much smaller, so it felt like a more intimate experience. Once the show was over, we took an Uber to Soho and did a little shopping. We planned to eat dinner there, but the place we wanted to go was closed, so after a few failures, we ended up at John’s of Bleeker St. for some yummy pizza! Wasn’t exactly what we planned on, but it was really good!
The next day we got up and headed back to Soho to go to the few places we didn’t have time for the night before before heading up to Central Park. We didn’t really have an agenda for Central Park other than that we wanted to see some areas we weren’t able to last time. We had a really nice time walking around for a few hours.
We took the subway from there to One World Trade Center. The observatory there opened a few months after we were there last time and Lee was really excited about it. I’m really glad we were able to fit it in! It’s a little expensive, but really well done and the views are beautiful. There weren’t any lines at all when we were there, so we bought tickets, went through security, and got on the elevators in probably less than 5 minutes.
We ended our night seeing Les Miserables on Broadway (which was seriously awesome!) and then grabbing a shake at Shake Shack.
The next morning, we had breakfast - yummy pastries and coffee at a bakery close to our hotel - and then took a car to New Jersey to board the ship for our Cruise to Bermuda!
