Finishing up Day 2: Wall Street and Times Square

Continuing on with Day 2 - I finally got some down time to finish out blogging about our trip! To finish off Day 2, we rode the subway down to the financial district to Wall Street. After seeing the sites down there, we decided on out trip back to the hotel that we would go ahead and stop at Times Square since we wanted to go down there at night while it was all lit up! I will warn you now that this post will subject you to picture overload, not that the others haven't already! There were just so many good ones, I couldn't decided which to put up and I didn't want to leave any of them out either!!! Enjoy!

The Christmas tree down on Wall Street right in front of the NY Stock Exchange

So awesome to see the NY Stock Exchange, since 9/11 they don't give tours anymore

I'm not sure what this building is called, but this is the site where George Washington was inaugurated as the 1st President of the United States of America. Pretty neat piece of history! I forced us to go to a few historic sites in the city, I love seeing historic stuff, I've been to D.C. once and I am dying to go back again!

Beautiful church down on Wall Street

Every girls dream! Tiffany & Co.

Self explanatory, and we didn't even get to see the man! In fact, we didn't see a single famous person on our whole trip, I was kinda bummed!

The Trump Building

And of course, I had to get a picture of the actual Wall Street sign

Introducing....

Wow, Times Square was unlike anything I had ever seen before!!! There were so many lights, people, and things to see! Not to mention that it was so loud down there! I wish we would have had more time to explore down there, but it was so cold, and we finally decided to just get back to the hotel before we froze!

If you've ever seen the music video for "Empire State of Mind", we stood right there on those red stairs where Alicia Keys plays the piano! Pretty cool!!

"Lieutenant Dan, ice cream...."

The always present Hard Rock Cafe, they're everywhere famous, right??

Inside the Hershey's store on Times Square, as if he needs more sugar!
Keifer with the World's Largest Hershey's Bar

I made them go into the M&M's store, who wouldn't want to explore three stories of M&M's gear?! They had everything!

Day 2: Chinatown and Little Italy

Next stop was Chinatown to do a little shopping around. It was a different world when we stepped out of the subway station onto Canal Street. There were people everywhere and there were shops everywhere!!! We did quite of bit of looking, a little buying, and Keifer tried his hand out at bargaining with the shop owners! It was definitely an experience!!!

A view of Canal Street

Kolby checking out one of the shops
See what I mean about people and shops everywhere!

This was a Starbucks!!!

We drank more Starbucks on this trip than we ever have before! I love their Signature Hot Chocolate and Kolby usually gets a Caramel Macchiato but they had their holiday specials going and he discovered the Caramel Brulee Latte.

Us grabbing some coffee and hot chocolate in Chinatown

We then headed north across Canal Street and took a walking tour of Little Italy. It was so pretty and quaint. It felt like we were in Italy (not that we've ever been there *wink*) but it was so nice.

While we were there, we decided to grab some authetic Italian food for lunch. Oh my gosh, it was so delicious. I had fettecini alfredo, the guys had some giant calzones, and Penny and Grandma had some type of Italian soup that was the restaraunt's special. This little place is where we grabbed lunch!

Grandma and Penny making new friends :-)

Day 2: Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero

Day 2 we started doing our exploring!!! I think we trecked all over this city on this trip, because I didn't want to miss anything. We still didn't get to see everything we wanted to...so I guess we'll just have to go back again to see the rest!!!

We woke up to a gorgeous day for exploring! This is our hotel looking all sunny!

After researching a bit, I learned that the tours of the Statue of Liberty take about 3-6 hours and run anywhere from $12-30 depending which tour you choose. None of us cared to go into the Statue of Liberty, we just wanted to see it and take pictures and go on exploring. So instead, we chose to ride the FREE Staten Island Ferry to, you guessed it...Staten Island! It was only about 30 min there and 30 min back, so we had alot more time to see other sites! To anyone considering a trip to NYC, unless you have a want to go inside, I would highly recommend going on the ferry to view the Statue of Liberty. We had an awesome view at no cost! Although, we froze our butts off! It was so windy and cold on this ride across the river/bay, I had to force myself to go outside on the deck to take pictures of Lady Liberty and the Manhattan skyline, but I couldn't stay out there longer than 5 min at a time!!!

Manhattan skyline from the Staten Island Ferry

Lady Liberty
Kolby and I on the ferry, it wasn't as cold and windy while we were at port!
Keifer and Penny on the Staten Island Ferry
Next, we hopped on the subway and headed over to Ground Zero in the Financial District.

Ground Zero was a moving experience, as I believed it would be. It is unbelievable to see a large block of emptiness with all of those huge buildings towering around it. They have already started construction on the new Freedom Tower 1 that will be built on Ground Zero along with the two reflection ponds that will be memorial to the original towers. The pictures below are of the construction site and a huge bronze mural that was across the street from Ground Zero.

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!!!

Me, Kolby, and Keifer...don't we look like true New Yorkers?!

Me and my man, I love this picture

Radio City Music Hall...so beautiful all lit up!

There she is in all of her glory! Rockefeller Christmas Tree!

I'm dreaming....

Of a white Christmas!!!!! Well almost a white Christmas, we had some snow up here in the North!!! So exciting! We usually get a little bit each winter, so we were excited to see it was here! Enjoy the pics!

The girls are trying to stay warm here, what'd you think, do they look successful??

Long time no Blog...

So I'm so bad...I haven't blogged in what seems like forever! My apologies! Going all the way back to November here, we went to Abilene for Thanksgiving with Kolby's dad's side of the family. Due to Kolby's work schedule, we weren't able to stay but Thursday and Friday, but we still had a fun time. Here are the FEW pictures that I got from our time there, (I don't know where my camera was during this time, but obviously it was not in use :-))

Jewels with her uncle Keifer

Jackie and Jewels

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we were invited to join Kolby's mom's side of the family in Arlington to go to the Tech vs. Baylor football game at Cowboy's Stadium. Kolby's aunt had box suite tickets for the game and let me say the seats were awesome!! All of Kolby's family was there and we had a blast getting to see everyone and watch the game.

Here is our view from the suite

GO TECH!!!!

I'm a bad blogger I know!!!

I've been such a bad blogger lately!!! I have lots of good stuff to put up just not enough time! No excuses I know. I promise I will get us up to date soon! As for now, I wanted to tell about our other photo shoot we were lucky enough to get to be a part of. At thanksgiving kolby's dad got the family together for a photo shoot Friday after. Check out the pics here ! They look really good!