Last week I went to visit my friend in New Jersey and we decided to visit New York City as I’d never been. We only had a day (really only about 6-7 hours), but we really tried to make the most of our time there. We visited Times Square, Central Park and the American Museum of Natural History (where I met my new best friend, a dinosaur). Here’s what happened…
We hopped on the train from Middletown NJ at around 10am, which got us into the city (Penn Station) at around 11.30am. We decided to find some food first off, sort of an early lunch as any later would mean that we would have been waiting around for at least an hour. We settled on Hard Rock Cafe (totally not my type of food at all – I lead an almost vegan lifestyle unintentionally [I really don’t like a lot of meat and dairy products]) and ended up with the spicy jalapeño burger with fries. It was a heck of a lot of calories, but we totally walked it off (seriously, we walked about 19,000 steps that day..!). We also took advantage of the guitar walls while we were waiting for our table to be ready. It wasn’t cheap, but it was far from expensive.
After this, we decided to visit the M&M store and the Disney store (just because I’d never been to NYC before). I restrained myself fairly well, actually, only buying a Lilo & Stitch mug from the Disney store (it’s my new prize possession. Like, really). I also took an M&M personality test and was sorely disappointed when I got ‘Dark Chocolate Mix’. What a cop-out.
After this, we decided to go to the American Museum of Natural History. However, we decided to walk the 35 or so blocks that it was from Times Square, which took us about an hour. However, it was such a nice day out, that it would have been silly not to. We ended up bumping into one of my friend’s old friends outside Carnegie Hall, which was absolutely crazy! This walk, however, took us through Central Park which is just such a lovely place. I couldn’t believe there was so much green in the middle of the city! We stopped for a few pictures in the green and carried on with the walk.
Eventually, the museum was in sight. Let me just say one thing, the suggested $17 donation for a ticket is well worth it. I was just saying to my mum that we were there for about 2 hours and we barely even covered a floor’s worth of exhibit. We went around the human development, USA geography/biology and Native American history sections before deciding to hunt down the dinosaurs (my one aim for the entire day). I literally squealed when we saw them. In fact, my friend has a video of my making odd sounds at the dinosaurs! I have so many pictures on my phone of these dinosaur skeletons, it honestly was just so interesting. I took plenty of picture with the dinosaurs that I keep posting to my Instagram (shameless plug there, it’s @kathryn_firth).
The museum closes at about 5.30pm (apparently you can get married there, and we think there was a wedding going on that evening), so we left and decided to try and figure out the subway to get back to Penn Station. I had no idea what I was doing, so just followed along like a little lost sheep! However, we made it back to Penn Station, back on a train, and back to Middletown by about 8.30pm. Then for a night of leftover gluten-free pizza, Lilo & Stitch and tea (in my new Stitch mug, duh). Good times.
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