Life's Next Adventures: The Big Apple

New York City 2013:

It all started with a birthday, Erica's 30th birthday to be exact. A little planning, a little fun, 4 girls and there you have it--a full weekend in New York City!

Sara and I started the weekend as we left Richmond Friday night and drove up to the DC area to spend the night with Erica. We grabbed dinner and got in bed relatively early.

Saturday morning, we left at 7:30 to go catch the Megabus from DC to NYC, after about 5 hours on the bus, we had arrived. We meet up with Amanda at our hotel, stored our luggage and got right to it. For lunch, we headed over to Katz's Deli (home of the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally)

They give out tickets to place your order so we grabbed a seat, placed our order and went to town being tourists! We got our lunches--we eat spilt meals and ordered extra pickles (homemade--YUM) and enjoyed taking in the scene.

After lunch, we went directly across the street where the girls all got some gelato, which they claimed was amazing. I resisted the urge, since I had just started counting points on Weight Watchers!

We walked a fair bit after lunch, hitting up Erica's cousin's house, then through Chinatown and Little Italy into SoHo for some shopping. After hitting up quite a few stores, we finally headed back to the hotel to officially check in and get ready for dinner. In true New York Style, we hit up John's Pizza--this adorable Pizza joint inside an old Church--it is the largest Pizzeria in country! And the Pizza was good too (although my picture does not do it justice).

One thing I love about New York is the architecture everyone:

Sunday Morning, we were up early again to get showered, dressed, and enjoy breakfast before venturing out to the 9/11 memorial. It was really impressive to see. They have these two reflective pools (this picture does not even begin to capture it), in the footprints of where the two towers stood. Etched around the side of the pools are the names of all the victims. Each pool is an acre in size and they are the largest man-made waterfalls in America (see told you the picture could not capture it all). It was pretty profound.

We also saw the survivor tree, this tree sustained damage during the 9/11 attacks but managed to survive the attacks, It was found under the piles of rubble and now stands at the memorial.

After the memorial, we took the metro to Harold's Square and went to the 10 floor Macy's store. It is actually only 9 floors, but then there is a bottom level with a cafe and stuff, so that makes 10! I couldn't resist taking a picture of the old wooden escalator while we were there. Erica and Amanda did some shopping, Sara and I hung out in the cafe, then proceeded to at least make an appearance on every single floor (just to say we had!)

After Macy's we hit the streets for some more walking and shopping and made our way to the Flatiron building, where we popped in at Eataly and then grabbed lunch at a cute little Deli where we ate at the counter :)

My HUGE sandwich--obviously could not finish this sucker!

More architecture pictures:

After lunch, we decided we would head over to The Natural History Museum. I mentioned that it would be fun to walk THROUGH Central Park to get there (Note: Do NOT ever listen to my silly requests again!) Walk through Central Park we did, this took a lot longer than little Laura anticipated and we were all quite tired by the time we arrived at the Museum. We got our tickets and proceeded to check it out:

Dinosaurs!

Mammoth!

More Dinos!

Obviously there are Buffalo in NYC!

After the Museum, we were all worn out. So we went back to the hotel for about an hour before dinner to change and rest a little bit. Then it was off to dinner and this cute TINY restaurant in the East Village called The Brindle Room--it was super cute and yummy--a great way to end our trip to NYC!