10th Anniversary Trip to NYC

For our 10th wedding anniversary, Heath surprised me with a day trip to New York City! We started the day at Macy's, stood in line at Santaland to see Santa (and sit on his lap). Then we walked down to 5th avenue to start making our way towards the Radio City Music Hall. We found a deli to eat at and I took pictures of our sandwiches and my husband told me later in the day about all the strange looks the local New Yorkers gave me. Oh well...none of them must be bloggers or scrapbookers, so of course they don't understand how my mind works! We walked right by the tree at Rockefeller plaza and around 1:30 pm, people were already lining up so they could get a good seat for the tree lighting that was scheduled to take place at 9pm that evening. New York city is a grid and it is truly easy to find your way around (as long as you have a map). We found Radio City Music Hall and stood in line to get in. We walked into the doors and the scene truly took our breath away! The holiday decorations, the HUGE chandelier, the crowds of people, and the nostalgia of the place was amazing! When I found the ladies lounge and saw all the mirrors and vanity tables I became quite giddy at the thought of what women perhaps sat down at this very place to put on some lipstick or check their hair before going to see a show. Maybe Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Audrey Hepburn, or Judy Garland? The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular was truly "spectacular!" I believe it's one of those shows you could go see every year and never tire of it.

After the show the crowds were getting insane because of the tree lighting scheduled to take place later that evening. We decided to make our way over to the "Top of the Rock" entrance and wondered if the line there would be insane, but it wasn't. Everyone was outside in line waiting for the big event. The Top of the Rock was a lot of fun! We chose this because it was closer to us than the Empire State Building, and gave us a nice view of the building.

The only disappointing part of our day was finding the NBC store closed. This is one place Heath really wanted to visit. He's a big Conan O'Brien fan and he used to take a lot of his guests down there when he was in NYC doing the late late show. After we made our way through the enormous crowds around Rockefeller plaza, we started walking towards the direction of our pick-up location. We found Time's Square by accident actually, and it was already dark which made our experience there much more cool with all the lights.

We went to the M&M store and found some cute gifts for the girls. We had already found a gift for our son back at the NBA store earlier in the day. We ate dinner at Planet Hollywood on Time's Square. It was a fun place. After dinner it was starting to get chilly and beginning to lightly rain, so we found a Starbucks (which are on every city block or so it seemed) to help warm us up before we hopped back on our bus to take us home.

New York city was not the crazy, scary place I thought it was going to be. I can't wait to go back and see a Broadway show. We also want to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island with our children one day soon.

Click the play button below to see a few of the photos we took while in NYC.