NYC, What Is It About You?

See, from time to time I can quote musicals that aren't Les Misérables!

When I first started scheming this little adventure and I was thinking I would be going alone, my plan was to get an Airbnb somewhere for a night or two, see Les Mis, visit the Strand Bookstore, and then take in whatever I could of New York in whatever time I had left. (MoMA & FAO Schwarz were high on the list, until FAO closed the week before we went. I'm still mad.) And while I agree that's a crazy way to attempt one's first trip to New York, my only reason for this trip was to see Ramin Karimloo as Valjean while I still could, so the rest could wait.

Of course, that turned out to be not quite what happened, because Keely was able to come along and "a day or two" in NYC quickly turned into a long weekend in NYC, which meant we could add a second show (It Shoulda Been You, recap of which is coming eventually, I promise!) and add a few more things to our list.

We ran across the New York City Pass and ultimately decided that it was a good way to see a whole bunch of things in a short period of time. We were able to hop from one attraction to another without feeling like we were wasting money on entrance fees to only be places for an hour or two. (And while we could have spent an entire day in places like the Met or MoMA, other things like Top of the Rock or the Empire State Building are really not places where you'd spend a whole day, no matter how much money you hand over to get in.)

So, here's what we did with our five days (I am so not looking up the links to all of these, so you're on your own for Googling):

Grand Central Station

Rockefeller Center

Top of the Rock

Central Park

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Guggenheim Museum

Times Square

It Shoulda Been You at Brooks Atkinson Theatre

The Museum of Modern Art

Les Misérables at Imperial Theatre

Discovery Times Square

Madame Tussauds

Chelsea Market

A Chelsea Market bookstore's
plea for people to stop stealing.

The High Line

City Sightseeing Cruise

Brooklyn Bridge Park

Bryant Park
Went by the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (New York Public Library), but had just missed closing time

Empire State Building

Strand Bookstore

Forbidden Planet
And Strawberry Fields in Central Park before we headed out on Monday

This is actually the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, but we
walked through Strawberry Fields to get here.

Obviously, with packing this much stuff into so short a time, I am probably the wrong person to ask for recommendations on anything. But if you do want my thoughts on what I did see, ask away & I'll do my best to answer.