​We were relaxing in the hotel and getting ready for a long night at Times Square.  If you’re going to try and see the ball drop for NYE you need to be prepared for a long day, especially if you want to be up close to all the action with the cool kids.  Times Square starts filling up around noon and when each section is filled the NYPD will block off a section of the street.  Once you’re in, you’re in—think of a heard of corralled cattle.  If you leave to go eat or use the restroom you lose your spot.  The surrounding restaurants will sell party passes that you can purchase to stay around Times Square, however we’re not loaded and we stopped keeping up with the Joneses a few years ago.  Instead we opted to eat dinner at McHale’s Irish Pub at 5pm.  We hung out until around 8pm when the restaurant started to fill up.  From there we had to travel up to 52nd street and enter the party pens, that is what I called them at least.  The NYPD keeps everyone behind barricades during the celebration for the anticipated ball drop.  As the closer pens clear out from people succumbing to their needs and finding a restroom or a drink they will allow partiers to go from pen to pen making their way closer to Times Square.  By the time the ball dropped Lisa and I had made our way to 49th Street.  Keep in mind the ball drops at 45th.  Even though we were four NYC blocks from Times Square we could still see the ball.  It is surprisingly small when you see it in person.  Almost immediately after midnight the crowds disappear and we were no exception.  I think we were asleep by midnight 30. 
 
The next morning we woke up, grabbed breakfast at the hotel and drove out of town.  We drove by Times Square on the way out of the Lincoln Tunnel back to North Carolina.  The drive out of NYC at 7 am on January first was great.  There were only a few cabs driving around, as opposed to the bumper to bumper traffic we had going into the city.
 
We enjoyed the NYC trip and can’t wait to go back on our sailboat to see it all from the water.  We didn’t get to see everything since there is so much to offer, but we’ll be back someday.  The traffic is horrible nearly any time of day, except early on 01 January.  The subway was a great way to get around town.  We bought a couple passes with $20 on them.  Each trip runs $2.75 so it was more than enough for us to get around town and see the sites during our three day trip.  If you pick up a subway map it’s pretty easy to figure out the system and plan where to transfer trains.  I thought it would be cheaper to drive and it was, just not as much as I thought it would be.  Parking was $42 a day at the hotel.  We paid around $60 in tolls to get from North Carolina to NYC and back.  Airline tickets for 2 would have been about double what we paid to drive round trip and I wouldn’t have to sit in the car for a full day each way.  Live and learn I guess.

You can check out a little video of our time in NYC here.

Lisa’s birthday was on the 29th and I wanted to do something special, as I always do, because I’m awesome.  Being so close to NYC, I decided to surprise Lisa with the Broadway show Wicked, on Broadway.  I’m not a big play guy, because you know, I’m a man.  But, Lisa loves the arts, whatever that means.  If I was going to take her to a show I figured I’d do it right and go to NYC.  With her birthday being so close to New Year’s Eve we made a week of it and stayed in the city to watch the ball drop.
 
I didn’t let Lisa know what her birthday gift was and she was guessing every stop during our drive to NYC.  She was able to whittle it down to NYC after passing Baltimore and guessed it was a show in NYC. When we arrived to the hotel Lisa and I got showered up and went looking for something to eat.  Gotham Pizza was right across the street from our Hampton hotel so we stopped by there before our show.  We had tickets to the 8pm show of Wicked at the Gershwin Theater.  I was actually surprised that I enjoyed the show.  Not enough to spend the money on tickets again, but it wasn’t a horrible experience.  We had middle seats in row K.  They were some of the best seats in the theater.  The lead characters Elphaba, and Glinda were great.  Glinda made it entertaining and was hysterical in several  scenes of the show.
 
The next day we took the subway around Manhattan.  For our first stop we went down to see the WTC memorial.  We were able to see the outside memorial pools with plans to tour the inside.  The line was about two hours long though.  We decided to skip the inside and went looking for some lunch.  We went to Stage Door Delicatessen since it was close to the WTC memorial.  Lisa and I got a slice of pizza upstairs before jumping back on the subway uptown to Central Park.  We transferred from the E train to the B train and got off at Cathedral Parkway, 110th Street station.  We wanted to start at the North end and walk our way back to our hotel.  We started in the North Woods working our way past The Pool, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, The Belvedere Castle, and ended at Bow Bridge.  We got a hot sausage and some toasted almonds from the street vendors in the park.  By the time we made it to Bow Bridge we decided that Central Park is a whole lot longer than it appears in the movies and took the subway from 72nd street back down to 50th to our hotel with plans to finish the South end of the park the next day.
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On the 31st we changed our minds and skipped the South end of Central Park.  Instead we jumped on the subway to see Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden (which is surprisingly round).  We didn’t go up to any of the observation decks as, we’re poor and the lines are atrocious.  If it’s a tourist attraction in NYC during the holidays and you don’t pay for expedited service, plan on standing in lines for hours to see anything.  The WTC, Empire State building and Rockefeller Center all had lines wrapped around the buildings, and the buildings are huge.  After our subway ride to our hotel we stopped at another pizza place, Famous Amadeus Pizza.  There really is a pizza place on almost every corner in NYC.  Out of the three, Famous Amadeus was the best.
 
Stay tuned to see how New Year’s Eve went.