Fairytale in New York

I have not been able to blog for a couple of weeks because I have just returned from a 9 day stay in New York. I was 50 last week and we decided that we should mark the occasion with a trip that I have always wanted.

We have had the most fantastic and exhausting time and we have both loved every minute of it. We stayed on 7th Avenue and were about 5 minutes from Time Square in one direction and Central Park in the other. Our hotel was The Manhattan at Times Square and we could not fault the service we had from the staff here. We managed to end up with an upgraded room, free wi-fi in our room for the whole stay (normally $15 a night) a free breakfast for one morning and because it was my birthday a number of free gifts and cards including boxes of chocolates, mugs etc. The hotel was just great and we loved staying here. When we visit again I think we would stay here again as it was good value for money.

We did all the tourist things you do when you go to New York so we went up the Empire State Building, went on the Statten Island Ferry and walked around Central Park. We visited the Rockerfeller Centre, shopped on 5th Avenue and wandered around Greenwich Village.  We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, sailed past the Statue of Liberty and boy did I have a big blister on my foot from all the walking.

It was great to visit at this time of year as the city was looking very festive with beautiful decorations and Christmas Trees all over the place. I loved the Salvation Army charity collectors ringing their bells outside store doorways and even enjoyed the freezing cold snow which fell on a couple of days.

We bought a $30 week long subway ticket and travelled to Coney Island to visit Nathan's the home of the hot dog. we both ate one for our breakfast!! Our favourites were the old fashioned deli diners where the portions are huge and you share a meal because you know they will be huge. Our two favourite delis were Carnegie's where we shared an enormous corned beef and pastrami sandwich called the Woody Allen and Katz's where I had the most delicious bagel with real American style cream cheese and lox (smoked salmon to us Brits).

We took almost 400 photos so I will share some of them with you but try not to bore you to death with too many. Well that was the last of my holidays for this year and we will now need to wait around 3 months until our next trip away. Time to spend some time at home and get the place back into some sort of order.