New York, Day 1

Earlier this year I had a crazy idea to go on a vacation to somewhere crazy without my kids. I would need someone willing to stay at our house with our kids for a whole week, so I emailed my brother and his wife with my crazy idea thinking that they would say no. They said they would, so we started planning our vacation. Do I have a great brother and sister-in-law or what!

Ryan had some Delta Sky Miles saved up and we booked our trip to New York. The most expensive part was the hotel since we wanted to stay somewhere close to all the Broadway shows. We were not too keen on the idea of staying outside of the city and relying on the Subway, so we splurged to be in the heart of it all. We did use the Subway a lot, but never late at night and most of the Broadway shows ended around 10:30 pm. I booked Park Central which is not a really nice hotel (not too bad either), but a block away from Central Park, Broadway, and Times Square. I bought tickets to Harvey and Wicked a month in advance, since those shows were selling out fast and they were the ones I most wanted to see.

After tons of research and preparation we left on July 17th. Since we were using Sky Miles, our flight was a connecting flight to Atlanta, Georgia with a 3 hour layover before going to New York. I will never use Sky Miles again and would much rather just pay for the flight next time (Yes, there will be a next time, because I have discovered that I LOVE traveling).

This is our connecting flight to Atlanta, Georgia. I enjoyed looking out the window and watching the dry desert landscape change to a beautiful lush green landscape as we traveled east.

We arrived at the JFK airport at 1:30 am and took a Taxi to our hotel. We would have been more adventurous and tried the Subway, but it was late and we were tired.

When we arrived at our hotel at 2:00 am, we discovered that they did not have a room for us and had to wait while they found one that could be used.

We had paid in advance and called ahead to let them know we would arrive late, but they did not save our room. There were several other unhappy guests with the same problem which I found out was typical for New York. All of the hotels in all price ranges were booked for the entire week. There was nothing special going on, New York is just a busy city. When we finally got our room, I did not even care that our view was of a brick wall and the shower was a bit disgusting looking. I was just glad I was not sleeping on the street.

The bonus about having your window face a brick wall is that there is no noise. I had read a lot of complaints on hotel review sites about the street noise keeping people up, but that was one problem we did not have. We actually had a hard time waking up, because there was no way to tell if it was morning since we were on the 9th floor and the brick walls surrounding our windows were about 30 stories tall. We had to turn on the news to see what the weather was like before getting dressed and heading out for the day.

Tomorrow I will write about Day 2.