Day 15: NYC by bus, hot, humid, rainy!

Thursday June 9th:
This morning we crawled out of bed, got ready for the day and carefully ate our hotel room breakfast……cereal, bananas and donuts…..balanced precariously on the little laps of potential spillers. We avoided any major spillage, packed up snacks and filled up camelbacks. This was going to be our first experience catching a NJ transit bus that would take us over to Manhattan. We thought about driving in-very briefly, especially after the Hoboken parking fun- and decided that would NOT be a good choice.


Riding the NJ transit bus sure was entertaining! Despite the fact that there is traffic everywhere, the bus drivers have no qualms about being lead footed, nor do they take any issue with stopping only mere inches away from vehicles directly in front of them. I’m completely serious!

Once we arrived at the ginormous bus terminal, we followed the mass amounts of people up to street level and got our first view of NYC, up close and personal.

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The kids found the traffic and the honking pretty crazy and immediately set out to ‘count’ the number of times they heard cars honk. You know how far that went……! Since Bill and I had been to NYC in 2008, we weren’t completely clueless as to how the city functions-basically a whole lot of walking and dodging people and objects on the sidewalks. We found the place to get our double decker tour bus tickets and Bill went in to get them. I stayed outside with the kids and prayed no one would wander off, be approached by some weirdo or that we would be told we couldn’t stand where we were standing. All of which were entirely possible scenarios!

We boarded the bus and the kids really got an eye opener as to what NYC/Manhattan is all about. Millions of people, thousands of cars, buildings, sights, smells, views. So very different from where, and how, we live. The constant movement in Manhattan is just incredible. Gregory said to me ‘I keep thinking I’m in an amusement park because I just can’t believe it’s real!’

We picked a spot to get off the bus-China Town- and enjoyed the smells of that area. Well, enjoyed is really far fetched. To quote Laurel ‘It smells like the city dump here Mom’ (how she’d know what the city dump smells like, I have no idea). I chuckled and then told her to hush! Really, it did smell pretty stanky, I can’t blame her! We quickly learned that NYC was tricky to figure out in terms of bathroom needs. There really aren’t ‘public’ restrooms unless you’re in a train or bus terminal and nearly every other business/restaurant had signs posted saying ‘you must purchase an item to use the bathrooms’. Well, that just stinks! Remember how often my kids have to go the bathroom? Yeah. We did get to experience the ambiance of the China Town McDonald’s. And the deteriorating chairs and booths. We bought 3 cheeseburgers and then pulled out our leftover pizza from the night before. We bought our rights to use the bathroom.

After some walking, and sweating, and walking, and complaining, and walking and more sweating,
we hopped on the tour bus to finish the uptown portion of the tour before it was dinnertime. Upon approaching Central Park, we saw mass amounts of people lining sidewalks around the area.

Turned out that the Black Eyed Peas, Taylor Swift and a few other artists were holding a benefit concert in the park that evening. Over 60,000 people were expected for the free concert. 60,000 people, can you imagine?! Sadly-especially for those that had been waiting in line ALL day-the concert was cancelled because a big thunderstorm moved through.

We chose Carnegie Deli as our dinner of choice for the night.

Aside from eating there just to say we ate there, I have to say the place is pretty much a rip off! They charged $3 for each person to share-they’ve got you either way-there’s no way in heck one person could finish that big a sandwich by themselves, so you HAVE to share!

We also ordered to orders of Mac n’ cheese to the tune of $6.95 each. We were expecting a whole lot more than what was delivered-reeeediculously lame amount of pasta mixed with cheese for that amount of money. Oh well, the kids liked it, ate the food and smiled at the experience-oh, and the pickles were free. We also took leftovers with us for lunch the next day.

Rounding out Day 1 of our NYC , we got a good look at Times Square. The huge LCD screens are crazy! They are everywhere, seriously everywhere!!

 Shortly after that picture was taken, it started raining, a lot! We made it back to the bus terminal and kept our fingers crossed the rain would stop by the time we got to our hotel stop. You see, the stop to get on the bus and go into the city was right outside the hotel. However, the stop we had to get off at to go back to the hotel was NOT that close. Couple of crazy road crossings, through a Home Depot covered parking garage, through another empty parking lot and over a grass hill and into the hotel parking garage. You know the whole comfort in numbers thing? I think our 5 kids discouraged ANYONE from getting close to us, even if they had any intentions!! When we got to our stop, the rain had not stopped, so we donned our freebie yellow ponchos from the bus tour and made our way to the hotel-

The kids treasures for the day, found in a shop near the waterfront-crazy voodoo doll key chains

Then we fell into bed. Actually I think I went down to the lobby and blogged about Florida! No rest for the wicked, right?