New York City - Day 1

For all you noobs out there, let me give you an insider pro tip. New York City is big. I've been to Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Rome, Paris and, heck, I was just in Boston a few days ago. Nothing is even close. It's pretty absurd, when you think about it. There are more people in a single, mid-sized office building in mid-town Manhattan than there are in my entire home town. It's crazy to think about.

We scouted out the train station near our campsite yesterday evening and figured out where to buy the tickets. There are peak and off-peak trains. The off-peak trains are slightly cheaper and are basically those that arrive at Grand Central Station after 10:00 am. Brady and I are full price, but the girls are only a dollar each (12 years old is an adult). Even then, it costs about $50 for the four of us to take the train round-trip each day. Add another $20 for a subway round-trip somewhere else in the city and it's pretty pricey to do anything.

This morning we got up early enough to eat, drive over and park, buy our tickets, pay for parking over the phone and then get on the train about 15 minutes early. I overthink everything.

These are the things on our (my) must-see list while we are in NYC and in roughly this order:
1) The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
2) The 9-11 memorial and museum
3) The Empire State Building
4) The American Museum of Natural History
5) The Metropolitan Museum of Art
6) Central Park
7) Times Square
8) Rockefeller Center

Even Grand Central Station is a cool place. There are stars on the ceiling arranged into constellations.

I asked the kids what they were most excited about and they all said the natural history museum, so that's where we are headed first. Things look strangely closer on the map than they really are, but I decided we'd just walk. As soon as you exit the train station, the immensity of the city hits you. Skyscrapers are just everywhere. Every direction you look, down every street in all directions are huge buildings. They seem endless.

This is poor attempt to capture it, it's just a random shot down some street.

Kind of on the way to Central Park and the natural history museum is Bloomberg Tower, where Tim works, so we wandered by and I sent him a picture of his building just to say hi. A few minutes later, he invited us up to visit. We had to come back later though because he had to put in a badge request which takes some time.

So, we walked to the southern edge of Central Park and cut through it to get to the museum which is on the west side of the park. If you haven't been there, Central Park is quite large. Large enough that you probably couldn't see it all in a single day. It is about 2 1/2 miles long and maybe half a mile wide (I looked it up - it is 843 acres). We only walked through the southern end, but it is quite pretty. It also has several statues, none of which we stopped to really look at or figure out the significance of.

Just as we popped out of Central Park and neared the museum, we spotted a food cart (they are everywhere) and the kids had been grumbling that they were hungry, so we stopped for hot dogs (not great), a chicken kebab (ok), and a pretzel (too salty). All for the low price of $25...yippee. Tim says that NYC is somewhat like living in an airport...everything is 150% of what you would expect it to cost and right now that seems about right.

The American Museum of Natural History was awesome. The kids were most excited about the dinosaur exhibit and the minerals/gems exhibit. So, many people will tell you that the movie "Night at the Museum" with Ben Stiller was filmed here, but that's actually not true. The movie was filmed at a sound stage that was constructed based on this museum and the exterior facade shots were shot here, but not the interior shots. I only mention this because it is hard to imagine how that would have worked, logistically.  Anyway, I took tons of pictures at this place...here are a few.

Stacey loves masks, so this was pretty cool.

Stacey and I have been watching Marco Polo on Netflix, so this was neat to see too.

This is a 34 ton meteorite. Yes, that's 68,000 lbs. There was a sign explaining how the steel legs holding it up travel down through the floors into the bedrock beneath the building. Pretty awesome. There is a portion of the meteorite polished down and it is pretty much just iron, so that's a huge chunk of pure metal. It is one of the largest in the world.

A blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived.

If you've seen "Night at the Museum," this is the inspiration for Dum Dum, a replica Moai. These are figures carved by the people on Easter Island between 1250 and 1500. Easter Island is between Australia and South America, off the western coast of Chile.

Titanosaur...absolutely enormous. It is 122 feet long and is so new that it has yet to be formally named. The neck and head stretch out into the hallway. It was impossible to get a picture of the entire thing.

We left the museum after 4:00 and headed back to Bloomberg Tower for our tour. You can't take any pictures inside though. The kids loved it. We got to go as high as the 29th floor and the weather and view were both very nice. Plus, the kids got free snacks! After the tour, Tim walked with us back to Grand Central Station and we went our separate ways. It was a lot of walking today and the kids were wiped out. I was fine :)

Tomorrow we'll head to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.