New York City

Last weekend, James and I traveled to The Big Apple.  We were heading up North to attend the wedding of one of James' grad school friends.  I have so much to say about both New York and Tyler and Julie's wedding, so I plan on separating out the two blog posts.

We took Friday off work, and to take full advantage of our time in New York, we booked a flight leaving Atlanta at 6:30am.  We set our alarms for 3am so that we could shower and get out the door by 4:30.  Needless to say, I was falling asleep a little exhausted by the time 9 o'clock rolled around Friday evening. Our flight landed in NYC around 9:30 Friday morning, and the adventure began.  We were staying at our friend Brent's apartment in the West Village but as soon as we got off the flight it dawned on us, we had no plan and didn't know how we would actually get to Brent's place.  Keep in mind I had never been to New York and James went once... in 7th grade.... on a safety patrol trip... with chaperones.  Yeah.

So we ended up getting an airport shuttle to Grand Central Station and then navigated the subway to Brent's apartment to drop off our bags.  By the time we got to Brent's we were starving (hello, we ate breakfast at 6:00am) and sweating. New York was unseasonably hot and muggy, as it had been sprinkling on and off.  This girl only packed jeans, boots and sweaters.  Needless to say, after we ate lunch we had to go shopping.  Those of you who know me well may think that I planned that little coincidence, but I promise I didn't!  James was very patient while I stopped off in a store and bought a dress really quick.

After we ate lunch, we headed down to the World Trade Center.  We didn't buy tickets beforehand, so we couldn't go on the official tour of ground zero, but we were able to see the construction of the new Twin Towers.  It was a bit eerie to be down there, and think that  just a little over ten years ago that whole area was covered in dust, chaos and fear.

After ground zero, we headed towards Wall Street.  We were hoping that we would see the Occupy Wall Street protesters so that we could take pictures and heckle them, but they were at a private park somewhere else in the city.

Of course, I had to get a picture outside Tiffany & Co. It's a girl thing...

After Wall Street, we headed down to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty.  Unfortunately, they weren't offering crown tours that afternoon, so we couldn't go up into the statue, but we did hang in Battery Park for a bit to take it all in.  We happened to sit down at a bench that had this carved into it:

I swear we didn't carve that ourselves.  Such a coincidence though...

We left Battery Park around 4pm when some of James' friends were starting to arrive in town.  We ended up going to get pizza with friends and hanging out Friday night.  Saturday morning we were up early to head over to New Jersey for Tyler and Julie's wedding.  More to come on that next...