New York Trip: Things to Do

I’m a little behind on blogging this week.  If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen that Todd and I had a long weekend away in New York City!  We had a wonderful time celebrating us both turning 30 this year, and our 8th anniversary!  But you know how it is – to do lists are long after returning from out of town!  I’m going to try and catch up around here, and posting about our New York trip is part of that!

This is a long post.  You may want to grab a cup of coffee (or wine), or just skim through it. 😉  Other bloggers’ NYC tips were very helpful when we planned this trip, so I wanted to document our trip to potentially help someone else. Also, please excuse all the selfies!

This post will be all about how we spent our long weekend in NYC.  The next post will be all about the food.  OMG, the food!  More on that later.

DAY 1

We arrived in New York bright and early on Thursday morning.  My brother-in-law is a pilot and hooked us up with buddy passes (Thank you, Joel!), so we got on the first flight out of Charlotte.  Couldn’t have been an easier process!  Then we used Uber to get from LaGuardia to our hotel.  We stayed right on the south side of Central Park, thanks to Todd’s Marriott points.  Remember a few sentences above about how I mentioned being spoiled?!  Yeah, even though Todd gets those points from having to work out of town, we still felt very spoiled on this trip!  The view of Central Park from our hotel room was just over the top.

 

(on the plane – my Zara scarf turned into a blanket)

View from our hotel room

First thing on our agenda was to walk on the High Line through the Meatpacking district.  We took the subway down to that area.  The High Line is such a cool concept and is a perfect way to see that part of the city.  The walkway is elevated, built over an old railway.  We loved it, and I’d highly recommend this if you take a trip to the city.

Along the way, we stopped in at Chelsea Market, another of our favorite things to do while we were there.  My friend Maureen, along with some blogs I read, suggested going here.  It is basically an old meatpacking plant turned into a market for a variety of restaurants, food, kitchen goods, and other handcrafted jewelry, clothing, etc.  The first day we mainly just explored.

We made our way from there to The Spotted Pig.  I’ll talk about that more in the food post.  DE-lish and it lived up to the hype.

At this point, it was early afternoon, but we’d been up since 3 am, so we took the subway back to our hotel and rested until our dinner and a show. We ate pasta for dinner at Serafina, then saw Wicked on Broadway!  This was recommended by many, especially my friend Erin, and it was fabulous!  I am not a big theater fan, but Wicked was so impressive and entertaining!

DAY 2

The 9/11 Museum and Memorial was first on the agenda for Friday.  If you go to NYC, this is a must-do!  You’ll need to go online and buy tickets in advance.  I recommend showing up at the time you selected when purchasing the tickets, or you may have to wait in a very long line, and potentially not even get in.  The whole place is incredible and truly honors those who died, the rescue workers, and speaks to the heart of this country.  Don’t miss it!

Wall Street is close to the World Trade Center, so we walked there to explore.

We went from there to Soho to have lunch at Grey Dog Cafe (recommended by a few friends), and walk around to shop.

Following Soho, we took the subway back to the Central Park area and had coffee at Le Pain Quotidien.  With so much walking, the breaks we had in restaurants were refreshing.

That afternoon we spent some time walking through Central Park.  We could’ve spent much more time there!  We veered right out of Central Park to Laduree for some macaron research. 😉

That night we had plans to eat at Spice Market.  Because we were going to be so close, we had pre-dinner drinks on the rooftop at the Gansevoort in the Meatpacking district.  It was hard to capture with our iPhones, but the views were beautiful! And Spice Market was ah-may-zing! More on that in the next NYC post!

(You can see the Empire State Building, pink for breast cancer awareness!)

DAY 3

It was raining this day, but it didn’t slow us down much.  We spent much of the day around Madison and 5th Ave shopping. We went to Niketown, FAO Schwartz, Bloomingdales, Zara, and TJ Maxx (random, I know).  We stopped in at a Chop’t for salads for lunch.

Later that day we got dressed again (As dressy as we could with the clothes we had left.  Piece of advice: bring nice clothes!) and took the subway back down to Chelsea Market.  The taco stand there had gotten rave reviews, so we had dinner there.  Did not disappoint!  We had ice cream for dessert, then headed downstairs, below the market, to the Tippler.  It is an underground bar featuring specialty cocktails.

We got up at 3 am that night, and used Uber to get to Newark airport.  Thankfully we got on the first flight and were back in Charlotte by 8 am!

I hope we can go back to New York sometime in the next few years.  We were honestly surprised by how much we enjoyed the city! One of my new favorite places. I am so thankful for the few days away with my husband!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to my mom for keeping Davis!  Also, THANK YOU to Joel for getting us set up with flights, and THANK YOU to Seth for keeping Kenan!