New Canaan, CT
We traveled to New Canaan so I could meet Alyssa’s seminary teacher Brad Rowley and his wife Natalia, who just had their baby Jack. We also planned to stay with them while we explored New York City for a couple days. When we arrived Brad and Natalia had dinner waiting for us, we were shocked to see Natalia standing and walking around after giving birth a few days before.
NY Yankees
Before the game we were getting ready to head to the city after buying some metro passes and realized that Alyssa had misplaced her purse somewhere. We tried to think of places that she could have left it and it turned out to be back in New Jersey at a service station we ate at before we went to the Six Flags theme park. Instead of exploring New York that day before the game we decided to go back and get her purse then go to the game (see previous post).
After the long trek back to New York and crossing the $15 toll bridge twice this trip we made it to the game. We sat up in the nose bleeds but it had a pretty good view. The stadium was huge and packed. The Yankees played against the Giants and it was a good game until the Giants took the lead and kept it. We are Dodger fans hoping a loss for the Giants which would bring the Dodgers standings up. Unfortunetely the Giants won and stayed in their place. After the game we headed back to New Canaan and ate a late dinner at a place called Gates. It was a bar/restaurant that had live music and decent food. We ordered burgers that were more meat than anything else, they were really good but wished they had a little less meat.
Manhattan
We started off early morning heading to the train station and found out the train was being worked on and had buses instead to take us to a different station so we thought about driving into the city and instead drove to the main train station and aboard we went into the city. We actually had the wrong tickets, we needed train tickets and we got a metro pass instead, fortunately the train tenant was nice and understanding so she let us continue on knowing we had the wrong tickets.
After arriving in the Big Apple we went to Times Square where we picked up our New York Pass. The New York Pass allowed us to visit a lot of places for a cheaper price than if we did everything individually. Our first tourist attraction we did was going up in the Empire State Building, it was pretty quick and the skies were clear so we got a pretty cool view. We got tickets for a hop-on-hop-off bus that we thought would be a good way to get around and boy were we wrong. There were so many people doing the same thing that the line to get on the bus was about a half an hour wait. We then went to Battery Park where we caught a boat to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The tickets to go up in the statue were all sold out and everywhere was packed. It took quite awhile to board the boats to take us to each place, it was still fun to see those places.
Once back in the city we caught the subway to Central Park where we rented some bicycles to stroll around. It was quite a warm day and got all sweaty from the 6 mile loop around Central Park. It took about an hour to do and we hustled to the next stop, Top of the Rock at the Rockafeller Center, where NBC show are recorded. It was a much cooler view than the Empire State Building. You could see Central Park and the Empire State Building and the rest of everything. Our next stop we had to run down to Time Square where we hopped on the night bus and have a tour of the City and even got to see a little bit of Brooklyn and some great views of the city. We wish we had more time (and more money) to see everything but we felt like we got to see a lot for a single day in New York.
