Holidays - New York

New York, New York! What a wonderful place. Despite being such a big, busy city, the people were lovely, friendly, and all too eager to help. Big shoutout there to our very flamboyant concierge at the hotel, who not only procured last minute Lion King tickets for us, but was sure to follow up the next day and make sure we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

2009-02-12, OS Holiday - 2 - New York

The City That Never Sleeps certainly didn't disappoint us, even though we didn't scratch it's surface. We stayed in a hotel in Manhattan, 2 blocks from Central Park. Our first day there was Obama's inauguration, and apparently a huge party at Times Square. Unfortunately that had slipped our mind, and we had already booked ourselves on a tour out to Orange County Choppers and the big discount shopping village, where we stocked up on warm coats and gloves!

We had a three-day pass for the big red double-decker buses that run tours around the city in a hop-on, hop-off fashion, and they proved to be worth their weight in gold. We could jump on one a couple of blocks from our hotel, and get on and off as many times as we want, and basically self-guide our way around the city that way. The tour guides in the buses though did a (mostly) great job of explaining and pointing out bit and pieces of the city, and filling in the story around it all.

The Lion King was showing on Broadway, and as mentioned above we managed to get tickets on the day. We could have gone to one of the two "half price ticket" offices in the city, but we didn't want to waste half the day standing in line. The show was superb - easily the best performance of it's type that I've ever been to. Better even than The Phantom of the Opera which we saw in Sydney, with Anthony Warlow, and that's a big call!

Central Park was beautiful in the snow, and it's easy to see why New Yorkers love the place. during summer it would be completely different, and I'd love to go back and see it when it's all green someday.