Last day in NYC

Today was our last day in NYC as we’re flying to LA tomorrow morning. After breakfast we thought it’s a good moment to do some laundry because there’s a laundromat just one block away from the hotel. After that we headed to Manhattan to visit some last places we’ve wanted to go to. First we walked to Madison Square Park to eat at the well-known Shake Shack, a outdoor burger place. Gotta say that there were the best burgers so far :9  After two very cold days it was much warmer today, mostly because of the mild wind and thanks to a blue sky with a warming sunshine. We aimed to buy stamps for some postcards from the postal office at the Rockefeller Center but due to Martin Luther King all governmental bureaus were closed so no postcards to Finland yet.. Maybe we manage to send those tomorrow at JFK.

After some donuts and coffees at Dunkin Donut’s we went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral which is a huge but typical and beautiful catholic church. Because it was the last day here, we walked all over Times Square and the surrounding blocks to have a final look at the Midtown area. We also stopped by at Madame Tussauds to check out the celebrity wax figures.. Now we’re packing our stuff for tomorrow’s flight and wondering which car we’ll get for our time in California and Nevada.

NBC and Radio City Music Hall tours

After 3 days with sunny and warm weather, the next couple of days weren’t that awesome. On Thursday it rained for the most part and although according to the forecast it should have been quite warm, it wasn’t. The weather was chilly and rainy the whole day so we looked for inside destinations to visit. First we decided to take part in NBC Studio Tour to see how the legendary TV broadcast station has been founded and developed in the past century and to see a bit how the shows are filmed and made today. After that we continued to the famous Radio City Music Hall. The tour took us across the theater to see various interesting places and we also met one of the Rockettes :)

Since it’s election time in Finland at the moment and we didn’t wanna miss our chance to have an effect on the coming president, we headed to United Nation into the Finnish embassy to vote. Olli’s cousin Johanna is working there at the moment and she gave us some hints where to go here in NYC. She proposed us a nice pub in the neighborhood so we went there to hang around and watch the Knicks’s game.

Thursday’s weather wasn’t much better, it was very windy and cold but luckily it didn’t rain. We started our morning with a long subway ride from Queens to Bronx to see something else than than just Manhattan. At some point during the ride we noticed that among the ca. 50 people in the subway car we were the only white people there. We arrived in Bronx at the Yankee Stadium and went for a walk around the stadium and the neighborhood. But we shortly noticed that it was too windy to really enjoy walking around there so we aimed back to the subway. The weather felt so cold that we didn’t wanna spend much time outdoors hence we visited some locations included in the NY Pass. We visited the Guggenheim museum and I’ve to say that I don’t understand modern art.

The target after lunchtime was the Madison Square Garden which unfortunately is not open for the guided tours around the arena due to some massive renovations at the moment. Before MSG we also visited Bloomingdale’s shopping center which is covered with all the luxury brands existing and we almost felt like being not brave enough to touch anything there. :) In the early evening we walked to Empire State Building for the New York Skyride which is a helicopter ride through the skyline in a motion simulated movie theater. The concept is really cool but it was a bit disappointing since the film was quite bad and not that sharp. After 5 pretty exhausting days, we were feeling tired so we decided to head back to the hotel pretty early to rest for the two last days here in New York before West Coast road trip.