I’ve been lucky enough to travel to the states many times, but this was my first time in New York! One of my lovely customers sent me some great tips and ideas (thanks Sophie!) which we used to create our itinerary, but of course NYC also threw some fun surprises at us along the way.
We landed at around 3pm on the first day so made our way to our hotel to drop off our bags and head out into the city as the sun was going down. By 5.30pm we were walking around Times Square and checking out Rockefeller and Radio City. We stumbled across this amazing Singapore Street Food market and had ourselves a fantastic evening of food, drinks and sightseeing.
We were up bright an early on day 2 to walk the High Line, grab breakfast and visit the One World Trade Centre and 9/11 memorial. There was quite a bit of police presence about and it transpired Joe Biden was in town. We saw him in the Hudson Yard area of town and it was a big highlight. While we were out and about we noticed an advert for a David Hockney exhibition (you can take a girl out of Saltaire!) which we decided to seek out. You know I always find a way to inject florals into a trip and this exhibition at the Pace gallery was entitled ’20 flowers and some bigger pictures’.
That night we had dinner at Chelsea Market – specifically a Japanese/Mexican fusion taco bar. Literally one of the best places I’ve ever been in my life. It was amazing. We finished the night at an Irish bar and grabbed a couple of slices of pizza on the way back to the hotel.
Wednesday was Nick’s birthday so we packed as much into this day as possible. This day we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and checked out Brooklyn and Dumbo. We had a brilliant breakfast and coffee down there before walking back across the bridge and catching the (free!) Staten Island ferry. You get the best views of the city and the Statue of Liberty on the ferry. After a quick wander around SI we got the ferry back to Midtown with a Dairy Queen treat and made out way back to the hotel to get changed for the evening. We had burgers and bar-hopped around New York and went to a lovely rooftop bar. We stopped off for yet another pizza slice (this time at the famous Joe’s!) before heading back to the hotel.
On Thursday we had a half a day before we needed to be back at the airport for the journey home. It was a lovely crisp and cold day so we grabbed bagels and had a nice walk around Central Park. We only covered about a third of it (it really is huge!) and we can’t wait to go back to see it again maybe in the summer months.
