Our Last Day in the City!

We planned to get up early this day to take a bike ride through Central Park. There was a bike tour of places in the park where movies and tv shows had been filmed. Unfortunately, we awoke in the early morning hours to lightning and thunder and pouring rain! Fortunately, we slept in and when we went outside, it had cleared up! We missed the tour, but we rented bikes and rode around Central Park on our own. What an amazing place! Just stuck in the middle of the city, but it seems worlds apart from the city!

This was a lake in the park. Across the way was another part of the city and I thought it was a cool looking skyline, so I used my camera's sweet panoramic option to get this picture!

Everyone else kept riding their bikes, but I stopped to take pictures of all of these cool places!

I liked this family of ducks on the pond....

There were playgrounds and ballfields, and apparently even a zoo but we didn't see that!

We did find an ice cream vendor and that helped to cool us down!

We rode all the way around the park, about 6 miles.

After the park, we headed to the toy store!

After playing there awhile, we started walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As we were walking, there was lightning and thunder, but it was pretty cool to listen to. There was some beautiful buildings on our way there and we were enjoying the view...about a block from the museum, the rain started and it poured! We ran the last little bit and ran into the museum. Even though it was a short run, we were pretty wet! Anyway, great place to wait out the rain!

Actually, we took this picture after we came out and the rain had stopped! I read a book in grade school called "From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler" and it was about 2 kids who hid in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I remember really liking the story and I kept thinking about it as we walked around. It is really amazing what is inside this building!

Whole temples, donated by countries who were helped by Americans...

Displays of suits of armor and weapons...I think these were described in the book I was talking about...

There were several rooms of these amazing inlaid wood walls...

And of course, original paintings I had only seen before in the game of "Masterpiece"!

The rain stopped and we headed off to dinner.

Burgers! Our favorite! While we were eating it started to pour again! We were glad we were inside enjoying our meal!

After dinner, we went to a movie, "Mr. Popper's Penguins." The theater was on the 8th or 9th floor of a building! We had to ride steep escalator's up and up and up! That was an experience in itself! It was a fun movie and it was set in NYC so we recognized places we had visited this week. After the movie, we said Goodnight to the City and went back to our hotel. We were picked up about 10:30 am and taken back to the airport! It was a great vacation and a good time was had by all! I'll leave you with this last cute picture of the girls in the t-shirts that bought at "Spiderman".

Thanks for sharing our vacation with me! It's fun to review all the things we did!

Day 6

I am finally getting to Day 6...sorry to leave you hanging! We started today by trying to go on a bike ride, but we were too late for the tour, so that will have to be tomorrow! We headed over to the Empire State Building and hoped we weren't so late that there were big lines. We lucked out and everything was moving along well. We rode a ride called the NYskyride that we thought was like Soaring Over California at Disneyland...uh, nope! It was more like Star Tours on steroids and was rough and not a fun ride. It took you all over NYC but it just didn't do much for us! So off to the top of the building and another great view of the city...

We came back down and headed to a pizza shop for lunch. This one was recommended by our food tour guide and it did not disappoint. Everyone picked their own flavor and we loved them all!

After lunch, we headed back to Times Square and Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. The only reason we went was because it was free on our NYC Pass. We bought the passes because the price was right for the things we knew we would pay to tour. But they also covered alot of other activities so we did alot of those things too. We figured out that we used almost twice as much as we paid for the passes! Anyway, the wax museum was a hit. There were celebrities, famous world leaders, philosophers, musicians, inventors (Bill Gates), athletes, cartoon characters, famous moments recreated (think 911 Fireman raising flag) etc. The kids had a blast posing and I don't know how many pictures we took, but here is at least one of each of us waxing famous!

The girls and Edward...

Tim and Julia while Oprah looks on...

Kelly, Cathy and Regis!

All the kids with Lady Liberty...we saw a lot of her this week!

Clark hooked up with John Wayne...

and Caleb played a little one on one with Yao Ming!

We had a great time there, but had to move on. We followed another tip from our food guide and went to a Mexican fusion restaurant. What is Mexican fusion you ask? I think it means the entree has a name you know, like taco or burrito, but the you can't pronounce the ingredients and you aren't quite sure what they are! But it was yummy, even if it was a little spicy. But hey, want else can you expect with a name like this...

After dinner, we went to another play..."Spiderman, the Musical" and it was actually a lot of fun!

Clark did another great job of seat selection and we had a great view of everything...on stage and above the audience!

We found this great lighted map of the theater as we were leaving so we took a picture of where we all sat! On the way back to our hotel, we found Cold Stone ice cream and took one more walk through Times Square!

A perfect way to end another day in the city!

P.S. To all you bloggers out there...any idea why the text color changed to blue halfway through my post??? It happened another time and I can't figure it out!!!

Day 5 (and counting!)

This was Wednesday, a little more than half way through our vacation. We slept in a little this morning and then headed out. We went to Penn Station and met our guide for a "Food on Foot" Tour. I think there were seven or eight groups(families, couples, or individuals) on the tour. They were from Germany, Australia, Canada, Texas, California, Florida, Ohio and us. We rode the subway to the first stop and then walked from there. We went to six different shops and tasted their food. The guide would tell you about the area, and the store and their food. He would make some recommendations, and then you would order and pay for what you wanted, whatever the amount. Because their were 6 of us, we were able to taste more things! We would get one of several different things and everyone could have a taste. The food was good and the variety was fun. It was also fun to walk along and talk to different people about where they lived and what they did for a living etc. There was a Dad with a son in between Tim and Caleb's age and they enjoyed visiting with him. So, here we go!

Our tour guide is the one in the blue striped shirt, that everyone is looking at! He lost his job a few years ago and after not finding another one, decided to try something he loved...eating! He picked some of his favorite places and created "Food on Foot" tours around them. You can do a Sweet and Savory tour, a baseball stadium tour, ours which was Go West and took us west of NYC into an area called "Hell's Kitchen". I think he would pretty much create any kind of tour you want! He did give us recommendations for other places to eat during the week. We went to three of them and they were all really good!

Our first stop...some of the best tacos we've eaten! Yum!

Next stop was a bakery. We had some great bread and a potato pizza...basically a crust with scalloped potatoes, delicious!

We walked a little way to this Bistro where the basis of their business is biscotti...probably 20 or more flavors. We aren't big fans of biscotti, but it was the best I have tasted! They did have cupcakes, too and we had one and it was delicious! I liked the inside of the store so here is a picture of that!

Next, we went to a sandwich shop. The owner/chef is the child of Italian immigrants and was raised in NYC. He has spent the last 8 years in Lisbon, Portugal learning to cook new ways. He came back and opened up this shop and it is extremely popular. He doesn't use mayo on the sandwiches, just a spiced yogurt. Our sandwiches were really good. He has some "usual" meats, but most are a little more daring...the dad and his son (asian ancestry) did try the octopus sandwich and said it was good. We weren't so daring, but ours were tasty and we were happy!

Someone offered to take a picure of all of us, so this was after we ate our sandwiches...

We walked a little farther, never more than a block or two, and went to this Greek Bakery.

We learned they are one of very few bakeries that still make their own phyllo dough...so we ordered several kinds of filled treats!

Our last stop was the Shake Shack. Here they serve frozen custard. Some people hadn't heard of it, but being from Utah and having eaten Nielsen's Frozen Custard, we knew just how good it would be. No small bites for sharing here! Plus it was really hot and ice cream sounded great!

This was where the tour ended...we said goodbye to our new friends, and spent the afternoon shopping around. We went to Toys R Us and the kids rode the giant ferris wheel...

a Barbie Car, no less!

That evening, we headed out to Harlem and had dinner at a place called "Sylvia's" that Clark had eaten at in February. It was a soul food restaraunt that is quite famous. There are pictures of Nelson Mandela, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few! We all had either fried chicken or ribs and mashed potatoes and other delicious sides. We were stuffed when we left and headed back to our hotel! It was an awesome day of eating, good thing we did a lot of walking!!

Day 4

We started this day early and headed to the harbor to go see the Statue of Liberty.

We were early enough to get tickets to go inside the base of the monument that has a museum about the making of the Statue of Liberty.
We climbed lots of stairs to get to the top of the base so we could look up at the statue!

We went back outside and took a few more pictures...




And went shopping in the gift shop...Then we took the boat back to New York.

We took a few minutes to consult the map and decide which subway to take...

And we made our way to the Natural History Museum, which is a subway stop and you walk off the subway and into the museum!
Teddy wasn't giving any tours, but we saw him on his horse out front! And inside we saw some pretty awesome dinosaur bones! Tim took these pictures...

After awhile, we were too tired to go on so we went back to our hotel to rest...
The girls were asleep within minutes! We rested up and headed out to dinner and a play..

It was a wonderful show and we all had a great time!