My wife and I recently started taking mini-vacations to New York City. I’m calling them “Museum Tours” but they may as well be tagged #3DaysInManhattan.
We live close enough to Manhattan that we leave our house at a leisurely time (after breakfast) and get there in time for lunch. I use SpotHero to reserve a space in advance in a parking garage near our hotel for two nights. It runs around $70/day. We like to stay near Times Square so we’re fairly central to all the things we want to do and we’ve been able to find rooms for $250-300 a night. I usually stay at Hilton-owned properties so I feel pretty good about the safety and cleanliness of the hotels, and they usually also have a restaurant/bar on-site if you’re into that kind of thing.
Our days in the Big City typically start around 8 or 9. We’re not in a rush – it’s vacation after all. We leave the hotel and grab a quick breakfast somewhere (Dunks, food trucks, whatever), and start to hike to wherever our adventure begins. These trips consist of a lot of walking. Like, a lot. If you’re not ready for that you might want to plan a different type of adventure. For example, it took us almost an hour to walk from our hotel at 8th Ave and 36th Street all the way up to the Guggenheim at 5th and 88th. That’s a long way. BUT A GREAT WALK! The Museum Mile runs along ritzy 5th Ave on the upper east side and it’s nextdoor to Central Park. When you’re done at the museums you can explore Central Park and take in all the sights and things to do there.
We also learned that Bryant Park is an excellent place to stop and chill-out if you have some time to kill, or grab a quick sandwich, or slowly sip a cup of coffee. There’s a lot of activity but it all seems to swirl around you making it enjoyable to watch but not so stressful because it’s other people’s activity. Damn, I hope I’m not becoming an old man who sits in the park. I wasn’t feeding the pigeons all day. I just enjoy sitting in the park and soaking in the energy.
On a recent trip we took a Big Bus Tour (one of the double-decker buses), which you pick up in Times Square and can either take the Downtown route or the Uptown route. We took the Downtown route which brings you through Times Square East, the Empire State Building, the Flatiron District, SoHo, Chinatown / Little Italy, Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty / Battery Park, the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, and back to Times Square (the M&M’s store) via Hell’s Kitchen.
What’s great about the Big Bus Tour is that you can hop-on and hop-off and go exploring in all the different neighborhoods along the way. When you’re done exploring you can just find another one of their stops and hop right back on the bus and continue along the tour. We first took the tour start-to-finish so we could get the full experience, then started the loop again and got off to start our trek around Little Italy. We had a great time walking around SoHo and Greenwich Village, Washington Square, Waverly Place, and many more.
When we first started planning these trips we were looking at museums we wanted to visit. We circled the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Guggenheim as the first two on the list. Obviously there are a lot more which makes it fun to know that we have many more trips in our future. Both MOMA and the Guggenheim held up to their reputation and we saw things in person that most people only see in books or in pictures online. Original paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh and Monet and many more. We saw sculptures that outlasted war and pillaging and decades (or centuries) of discard.
After that first trip we made it back to visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka “The MET”) as well as the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space museum. I won’t give away all the juicy details of each museum but we haven’t regretted a single spot yet. More likely we walked away saying to each other “that place was amazing!”
Of course, while in NYC the trip isn’t complete without seeing a show on Broadway. I’ve never been much of a “singing & dancing” guy, but I’m open minded. Plus my wife likes it so that means we’re going to be seeing a show while we’re there. No regrets. I haven’t seen a bad one yet. So far we’ve seen POTUS, the Tina Turner Musical, The Book of Mormon and Paradise Square. Your tastes may vary but all four of those shows were extra-base hits in my book. The Tina Turner show was a home run. The Book of Mormon was hilarious. And Paradise Square was a walk-off grand slam (to continue the theme). It was incredible and the lead actor was deserving of her Tony Award.
One thing to note about seeing the shows is that you can get discount tickets at the TKTS box office at Times Square for same-day show. Discounts as much as 50% off for center stage orchestra seats. In real numbers that means getting a $200 ticket for $100. But here’s the rub… the line can be long to get those tickets. The box office opens at different times on different days but when we get there on Tuesday it opens at 3pm. That means we’re getting into line at 2pm. You have to adjust your day’s itinerary to accommodate that. The do have a “fast pass” program where you can show your ticket from within the past 7 days and you go straight to the front of the line. It’s a great advantage if you’re there for two nights and get tickets the first night. Basically no waiting on Day 2 which gives you more time to roam the city.
Last piece about our trips that most people ask about is THE FOOD. Where did you eat? Is it outrageously expensive? High end food? Food truck food? Food on the go? Etc. Fair question. We haven’t gone to any super high-end restaurants. We’re usually looking at spots that are in or near the Theater District so we can go straight to the show after dinner. We did have a great experience at Carmine’s Times Square last time there. It’s family style dining and they bring you A TON of food. It would be ideal with 4 or more people, but we went with just two of us and ended up with two big boxes of leftover salad and Chicken Scallopini. Fortunately they fit in our hotel refrigerator and we did snack on it for a couple days.
I know there’s a lot more to the city than what we’ve seen and targeted so far, and we look forward to seeing all the nooks and crannies it has to offer. Each time we visit we think to ourselves “how much fun would it be to live there?” It’s not really common retirement planning to move to NYC once on a fixed-income, but it would be amazing to sub-let a place for a year and just experience it all. I think I’d be done after that and ready to go home. For now, we’ll continue to enjoy our 3 Days In Manhattan trips and soak in all that the city has to offer.