Showing posts with label Red Hook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red Hook. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Last days in NYC - Be ready for a photo bomb!

This is my last post about our actual trip to New York.  I have one more post up my sleeve in regards to New York but it is different.  I promise.

So on our last day in New York (a Monday), we headed out to the city with Liz and Mike.  They both had to go to work so we all rode on the Subway until their respective stops.  We managed to make it to where we wanted to go just fine.  Even with a subway line change that made us get back to the street level and walk quite a few blocks before re-entering the subway for a completely different train.

Our first stop was the museum district.  We walked a little through Central Park and toured a children's playground before officially heading to the Metropolitan Museum.  Only to find out it was closed on Monday's.  Bummer.

Instead we decided to check out the Guggenheim Museum (as it was one of the required stops that Jon wanted to make anyway) and prayed it was open.  Lucky for us it was.

The ceiling of the building was quite impressive.  There were a few very famous artists work in there (like Monet and Picasso) and a lot of other works that I was not exactly impressed by.  I mean, some of them I could have done.  And if you know me, I don't draw well at all.

Afterwards we  knew we had some time to kill until we met Liz for lunch so we moseyed around Central Park.

We walked around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and admired the buildings on the other side of the "lake".  Jon thought this building might have been in one of the Ghost Busters movies... I have no idea because that is one of the many movies I have not seen.

Can you tell I am loving PicMonkey?

We walked on and found a bridge running over a very disgusting looking pond/waterway.  The green was so still and bright it almost looked fake.  If you looked closely though you could see turtles moving around in it.  Yuck.

We rushed over to meet Liz for lunch at a sushi place.  It was yummy.


Afterwards we went over to The High Line.  It is a park created from an old above ground train line.  It is very pretty and you get to walk through the buildings far above ground level.


They make the sidewalk run between the old rails.  You can even still see them.


I was fascinated by all of the street art around New York.  This was on a side of a building that you could very clearly see from the High Line.


This is one of the really cool buildings that Jon loved and wished he could live in.

We had to leave The High Line because we saw massive rain coming and didn't want to spend the rest of the day soaked.  We hid in a burger place and watched the New Yorkers run around in the rain.

Thankfully the rain stopped so that our walk back to the train was nice.

We packed up and prepared to leave the abode at a ungodly hour of 5am.  We made it there and found a horribly long line to check in.  Hell happened.  We finally made it to the counter and checked in.  Then we had to get at the end of the line for security.  Well the end of the line started at the beginning of the other terminals line.  So by the time we made it through and to the gate we found out that our flight was cancelled.

No explanation.  So we carted our stuff back to the line to wait to reschedule our flight.  We waited for like two hours.  Oh, and did I forget to mention that all of the other flights into Florida were cancelled that day.  When it was pretty obvious that the people in line were about to have a freak out, I started hearing strings.  Like violins.  I thought someone in line for security must be bored and is practicing (yes the line was still that long and moving that slow).  Only for the sound to multiply to a couple violins... to a while group of them!
These kids were supposed to be on their way to Disney to perform the next day.  I felt horrible that they were going to miss out on performing.  The leader thought it would be a good idea to perform in the airport for all of us others that weren't able to leave too.  I think so that at least the kids got to perform for some people.  They were really good too.

Once we finally managed to reschedule our tickets for the next day we headed back to Liz and Mikes.  On the way we had to stop at her brothers for the spare key.  Talk about being obnoxious to everyone involved!

We didn't get to have breakfast during all of the drama (I did eat a little bit because I would have gotten very angry without it).  We went to a really cute place for lunch Le Petite Cafe in Brooklyn.  It was so cute!!!  They had a rock wall waterfall.

Since we had extra day in New York we decided to head to the Met since we had missed it the day before.  I was so excited because there was an Egyptian exhibit!!!
This guy was 9 TONS!!!!
I loved checking out all of the artifacts and we even spotted a duck!

And I became part of the exhibit too. :)

Jon really liked the modern art area. This table was molded by an injection process by a 3-D printer.  It looked like broccoli to me.

This was painted with dots.  From far away it looks like a complete picture  but up close you can see the dots.

This was my favorite piece in the Modern Art area.  It was a huge curved bowl made out of tiny hexagon steel pieces.  It depended on how you looked at it, you could see yourself semi clearly or completely distorted.


My favorite section besides the Egyptian was the musical instrument exhibit.  I just wanted to reach in and touch all of the different flutes.  I wanted to play them to see how much they sounded like the one that I played all of those years.




An open holed piccolo!  I didn't know they existed!


A piccolo clarinet!  How cute is that!

The porcelain one was beautiful.  I don't think I could bring myself to play it if it was mine.

The clear one apparently was brought on hunting trips... I don't know the thought process behind bringing a glass horn on a hunting trip... but okay!
Once Jon was able to get me out of the music room we had just a handful of minute left before the museum closed.  We found a fountain of a boy holding a (you guessed it) duck.  There are ducks at the bottom too spitting out water.

After the museum we headed home to to with Liz and Mike out to dinner.  We found more unique street art on the way.

We had a view of the city from out table.  We had hoped to eat on the roof but it was too long of a wait.

We did a mini tour of Red Hook again and we missed the sign.... again.

We went to a pier and more street art.  It was much larger than this and covered the entire expanse of the building.  This was the only area really well lit in the night.

We had a clear view of the Statue of Liberty again.  That is a ferry on the water to the left.

And our night would not be complete without seeing my favorite building again. :)

We did make it out on our flight the next day.  The airport was completely different.  No crazy long line, security went quickly.   The only problem is that somehow when we got rescheduled Jon's name got screwed up in the system.  I freaked a bit but the guy that helped us was great and got it all sorted out.

Thanks for sticking around!  I will have a fun gluten-free day tomorrow!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

NYC Vacay Part 2

On our third day in the NYC, Liz and Mike brought us to their community farm.

It was so freaking cool!!  They pay for a 1/2 a share and owe the community 9 hours of work over the course of the season.  Each week they get to take their 1/2 share of the food!


I have to say there was amazing looking veggies as you can see.

The view of the city from Governor's Island
After the veggies we headed over to Governor's Island for some lunch, biking, and Statue of Liberty viewing.  It was so great!

Jon and I rented bikes (which were so weird because it had pedal breaks vs. hand breaks).

Hi Mike!

I had never seen the Statue of Liberty before and I was a little underwhelmed.  I thought the statue was smaller than I had expected.  The photos all make it look so huge and in person it wasn't the same.   After checking out Lady Liberty we biked around the rest of the island and checked out all of the old buildings.  It was really interesting to see and think about how people used to actually live on the island.

We headed home and chilled for a bit before leaving to go to the Nitehawk Cinema to watch Moonrise Kingdom.  The theatre was cool because it is one of the dine in ones.  I enjoyed the food and the smore's pie for dessert.  The movie was pretty good.

When we got out of the theatre we realized how cool the building was!  We arrived early so it was still light outside.

We made a trip to a look out area to check out what the city looked like at night.  As we were walking up we heard what we thought were fireworks.

We were right!!  The party they were prepping for on Governor's Island was in full swing.  It was a Gay Pride something or other and they had decided to have fireworks.  It was great because we could see the Statue of Liberty AND the fireworks at the same time.  It was a pretty long show too!


After seeing the fireworks the skyline of the city at night looks pretty darn good too!


On our way home we took a mini tour of Red Hook.  We were not ready with the camera so this was the best shot we were able to take as we were driving by.

On our fourth day in the Big City, Jon and I ventured out on our own!  It was funny how I knew (remembered) how to get to the subway better than Jon!  We made it to the right stop and headed over to the 30 Rock Building.

We thought we were going to have to wait to get a ticket up to the top but we were pleasantly surprised that we were able to go right up!  The elevator ride was crazy!  I almost had my dizzy/sick feeling but luckily it went away quickly.  And yes, it is true you need to ride looking at the ceiling the whole time so you don't miss out.

The view was beautiful!!  I have been up very high to view skylines before in Las Vegas and this was just as amazing but completely different.  I could not believe just now many buildings there were.  And that you could pretty much see them all!!  You could see the Empire Statue Building, the Chrysler Building (which was hidden by the Met Life Building), and Times Square.  I was so happy there were difrerent levels so each view was just a little bit different.  Jon went picture taking crazy.  He also ran into one of his co-workers!  He couldn't believe it.


As we were walking through the levels we found a room where the lights on the ceiling followed you around and made noised.  It was so freaking cool!

I couldn't believe we had gone waaaaay up there!!!

After we left it was time for lunch.  Jon found a Chinese food place online and we hoped that it was going to be delicious.  It wasn't delicious, it was amazing.  When the rice arrived I was worried that Jon wouldn't like it.  With his first bite I could tell he was loving it.




We hit up Times Square and checked out the scene.  Jon went off and took some great shots of the buildings and what not.  I had been before and it was "old news" to me. :)

On our way back home we saw this really interesting building.  It was beautiful.  There were numbers all the way to the left (the ones in the middle changing super crazy).  A guy overhead us talking about it and explained it all to us.  The numbers were in military time, then the crazy numbers were the milliseconds, and the last set was a count down until midnight.  It was amazing.  The center sculpture represents the beginning of the Earth and basically how it was created.  The hand of God at the tippy top (a representation of being the Father of the Earth) was pointing directly at the statue of George Washington (a representation of being the Father of our Country) across the street.  Both of their hands are shaped the same and pointing at each other.  The last part is the little gold ball.  It shows the phases of the moon!  I wished we could have been there at night to see it and how accurate it was.


After all our walking around we headed home and were rewarded by going out to eat pizza!  Yes, I admit I was not gluten-free conscious for this meal.  I had decided that I would have a NY pizza and deal with possible headache later (luckily no headache!).  And holy crap it was totally the best pizza ever.  Oh and yes, Jon and I ate the whole thing...

There is more fun stuff to share next week. :)