NYC - Again

A couple of weekends ago, my sister Jennifer and I decided to head to NYC for some quality Christmas time since she isn’t going to be with our family for Christmas.  She flew in from Tampa and I flew in from Birmingham.  We stayed at the Hilton in Times Square which is where Justin and I stayed when we went for our first wedding anniversary.  Times like this make me glad Justin travels as much as he does.  He used skymiles for my flight (and I had first class on the way back - woo hoo!) and hotel points for our hotel.  So traveling to the city cost us nothing :)

Different story once we got there though.  Here’s something you may not know about me.  I am not a shopper.  I hate malls.  I hate shopping.  Hate it.  I wear clothes that I’ve had for years and years.  It doesn’t really bother me at all.  I probably go on two big shopping sprees a year, one for summer and one for winter.  Well, the winter shopping spree occurred in NYC :)  I’ve been to New York so many times I can’t remember, but I have never shopped there.  Ever.  So Jen and I did a lot of shopping.  Here’s some other things we went to see:

 

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.  We actually ate lunch at an eatery on the NYU campus which was pretty cool.

This is us waiting on a subway.  The subways are up and running from Sandy now.  There was one train that was out of commission still, but the rest managed to get up and running again.

Wollman Rink.  When I came to NYC with my mom several years ago (we actually went the exact same weekend that Jen and I went - weekend after Thanksgiving) I went ice skating but my mom didn’t.  She said her bones were too fragile :)  This time though, Jen and I just watched the kids skate.

The Plaza Hotel.  It’s across from FAO Schwartz, which we ended up standing in line for a brief period of time to be able to enter.  I bought a New York ornament because as many times as I’ve been, I’ve never purchased an ornament to go on our “travel tree” as we like to call it.  I also got Carter a puzzle board as a gift from Santa.

This was at the 9/11 memorial where the freedom towers are still under construction.  I was so excited about seeing the waterfall monuments where the North and South tower used to stand. 

These are the names of all the people who were killed in 9/11.  Both waterfalls have names engraved around them.

Freedom Towers

The Rockefeller tree.  I’m not gonna lie.  As soon as I saw this tree I told Jennifer “she ain’t real pretty!”.  And she’s not.  But it’s for good reason.  This tree went through Sandy and made it out ok, so I would expect she took a pretty bad beating.

Radio City!  We wanted to see the Rockettes, but chose to see a Broadway play instead.  Chicago :)

This is us in Times Square

The view from our hotel was of the Carter Hotel.  Made me miss my baby :(  This was also around the time Justin called to tell me that Carter was finally saying “mama”.  I may have wanted to leave right then to go home :)

It was a great trip even though it was a quick two day trip.  It was a nice weekend of downtime before the busyness of Christmas.  Last weekend I was in one of my best friends wedding (will blog about that later), this weekend is Carter’s first birthday party (tear), next weekend is our Sunday School Christmas party at our house (it’s on the 21st, 12-21-12, so naturally we’ve nicknamed it the “end of the world party”) and finally, the next week is Christmas and Carter’s actual first birthday!  Busy busy busy!!