One Night In New York

I suggested very early on in our planning stages that we should go via the United States to get to Sydney instead of the more traditional route. This was for three main reasons –

1) By the time we were leaving we wouldn’t have had a holiday for over six months and we were still working our 12-16 hour days right up until the end, so I reasoned we should be able to treat ourselves a little.

2) Richard had never been to America and I thought he should experience it. Similarly, I had only ever been to Florida and was desperate to see more.

3) We were financially stable enough to do so. By avoiding the traditional backpacker route through South East Asia, we would be able to go that much cheaper way on the way home and be able to say that we had circumnavigated the globe – which is pretty darn awesome.

We set about booking our flights and quickly found that we could add additional stops for very little or no cost and that we could take our time getting there. Our trip therefore looked like this:

Fly: London – New York – San Diego

Road trip San Diego to San Francisco

Fly: San Francisco – Los Angeles – Sydney

Our flights cost us £737.72 each so less than 1500 quid for 8 flights, good work Richard.

The New York part of our trip was a long stopover and I would highly recommend that if ever you are given the option to spend some time in NYC, then you should take it. A few months before we left and completely coincidentally, we realised that Mummy and Daddy McKenna would be in The Big Apple at the same time as us. We didn’t realise it at the time, but that would become a huge advantage for us when we got there.

Our flight into JFK landed at 20:30 and our flight out departed at 17:30 the next day. This meant that including immigration, baggage collection, travel in and out of the city, sleeping and checking back in for our next flight we had 21 hours in total, which gave us about 6 hours to explore the city.

Let me just say this from the outset: six hours is NOT long enough to do New York City. For most people six days wouldn’t be long enough to do New York City. Most people however, are not armed with the secret weapon that we were armed with: Alan McKenna, Tour Guide Extraordinaire 😂 My parents had been in NYC celebrating mums 50th for four days by the time we arrived and by then my dad considered himself a little bit of an expert. With his help we managed to tick the following tourist boxes:

✅ Ride a New York Yellow Taxi (technically since we did this on the way from the airport we didn’t need Dad for this one, but I’ll give him the credit anyway)

✅ Visit Times Square

✅ Go to ‘The Top of the Rock’ at The Rockefeller Centre

✅ Visit Central Park and see the hotel featured in ‘Home Alone’

✅ Walk down Fifth Avenue (and 6th come to think of it)

✅ Take cheesy family photos outside the ice skating rink at The Rockefeller Centre

✅ See the Statue of Liberty and Times Square NYE ball (both from the 69th floor of the Rockefeller Centre, but again I’ll take it)

✅ Visit Grand Central Terminal (not station, our superstar tour guide was once again on hand to ensure we knew the common mistake)

✅ Walk past The New York Public Library

✅ Stand under The Empire State Building

✅ Visit Macy’s (where we ate a GIANT slice of pizza)

I can’t write about all of the above as this blog post would be about three days long, so I’m just going to talk about The Top of the Rock. First thing to consider about this attraction is that skyscrapers are high. Might seem quite self-explanatory, but when you get caught up in the excitement of New York City you forget that it is basically built in the sky. As someone with an irrational fear of falling, being at the top of a skyscraper was probably the last place I would ever want to be. That said, I absolutely LOVED it. We got an obligatory family photo before we headed up to the 69th floor and from there you quite honestly feel like you’re on top of the world, it reminds you just how small and insignificant you are and is a very humbling experience. My parents were fortunate enough in the earlier part of their trip to go to the top of The Empire State Building, but they said the overall experience at The Rockefeller Centre seemed more entertaining, much more like a theme park ride.

Overall, our One Night in New York was incredible and I would jump at the chance to do it again. If you’re prepared to hit the ground running and miss out on a few attractions then you could do the city that never sleeps in a day. That said, if we do go again in the future we would definitely give ourselves a bit more time.

We arrived back at the airport emotionally and physically drained and very much ready for the next step in our adventure. Sunny California was calling out our name, but first we had to endure a six hour domestic flight…

#Love #WorldTrip #RTW #Family #NewYork #NYC #Adventure #Travel