Kolby, Laura, and Beau: Now your in New York!!!! (Day 1)

Finally I've got some time to relax, sit down, and do a little catch up on my blogging!!! Yay! And so I will begin with my massive catch up...but, don't worry, I'm going to break it up, cause I have lots to blog about!

December 10:

The first day of our New York, NY trip! We went to NY with Kolby's mom, Penny, his Grandma, and Keifer. We had been looking forward to this trip so much, Grandma was the only one who had been there before so we were all excited to go!

When making the plans for our trip, we decided to fly out of Austin as it was a more central location for everyone and it ended up being cheaper to! Our plane was due to leave at 6:05AM...seems simple enough right?! You've seen the movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York where the family is running through the airport to make their plane?! Well, that was us! It all started when we stopped at Whataburger on the way to the airport to get some breakfast, and they took forever to get our food. Once we finally made it to the airport, got parked and caught the shuttle to the terminal, it was about 5:30AM. The man at the check in counter was not very accomodating (or nice, for that matter) and as we were trying to check our bags, he kept repeatedly telling us that we were late and going to miss our plane, etc. All the while he was yapping, we were losing time to make our plane because he was going SO SLOW!! Keep in mind that due to bad weather in Chicago where our connecting flight was, this was the only flight for the day going from Austin to Chicago!!!! So we were RUNNING!!!

Thankfully, we did make our flight, I think we were literally the last people to board the flight! But we made it! Our flight to Chicago went smoothly, and we were ready to hop on our connecting flight after our 2hr layover. That was until they came over the intercom and said our flight had been delayed 1hr due to the bad storm that was moving across the East Coast. So we waited a little more! In the end, our flight was delayed about an hour and a half total. Finally we were in the air and on our way to NY!!!

With all of our craziness with our flights, I didn't do much photographing during our travels, so here are the only photos I got of us in the airports...

Kolby grabbin some breakfast during the layover

Keifer, Penny, and Grandma

Once our plane landed at LaGuardia, our story only continued! Due to our late check in and our delayed flight, our luggage made it to NY before we had, and so we had to go the claim office to find some of our bags, while others were stacked in the corner with claim tickets on them. Oh the fun of traveling, haha!

Once we had our baggage in tow, we then had to make it to our hotel. Yet another leg to the never ending story of getting to NYC! In my researching for the trip, I learned that we could take a taxi for about $40-50, or we could take the bus for $2/person. Since we had five people we would have to take 2 taxi's therefore costing us twice the price, so in our naivety, we rode the bus! Two words...BAD PLAN!!! It took us about an hour and a half to get to our hotel on the Upper West Side, not to mention that there were probably 50 people on this one bus! Apparently it was rush hour and the buses were packed!!! We got a good taste of NYC and we definitely got our $2 worth out of that ride!!! We all agreed that we would be paying for the taxi on our return trip! I wish I would have gotten my camera out during our bus ride, but I think my hands were pretty much tied to our luggage so no one sticky fingered any of it! But those pictures would have been priceless!

When we wer planning this trip, I asked Kolby what he wanted to do in NY, and his list was pretty simple: ride the subway, heat a hotdog from a street vendor, and go to an Irish Pub. Once we got into our Hotel, we went to find some supper, we got some New York style pizza at a little hole-in-the-wall place right down the street, then we went to the Dublin House to get a drink before going out for the night. First night out, we got to mark off the Irish Pub experience!

Fun fact: The bar tender said that this neon sign is the oldest working neon sign in NYC! Pretty cool!

We decided that we wanted to go see Rockefeller Center while the tree was all lit up, so we headed down there our first night! It was absolutely amazing, it definitely made you feel like you were spending Christmas in NY!!!