Some Things You Can Do in New York in One Day, or One Weekend

We've been in New York in 2006 and in 2008. The first time, we went for the weekend. The next time we could only be there for one day.

We went to New York in 2006 for the weekend. It was Thanksgiving weekend. Even though it's not a time I would recommend being on a plane or in an airport since the airports and planes are jammed with a lot more people who don't normally fly and behave a lot differently than those who do fly regularly.

It is a wonderful time to be in New York to shop and to see the sights. The people are really nice, there's a really festive atmosphere in the air and there are a lot of holiday specials in the stores. The streets are full of holiday celebrants. If you can tolerate the airports and the airplanes during this time, it's worth the trip to go at least once during this time.

We took the AirTrain from Newark Airport to the train station where we took the NJ Transit train to Penn Station. The Airtrain was free whenever we've taken it. But there is now a fee which is included in the NJ Transit ticket you purchase. Penn station is near Eighth Avenue and 33RD Street.

We stayed at the Red Roof Inn in Little Korea, which is about three blocks away on 32ND Street near Fifth Avenue. We had a nice room which was around $100 per night, which came with a free breakfast which included a choice of cereal, bagel with cream cheese, toast, milk, fresh fruit, yogurt, juice and coffee. The hotel also furnishes the room with a refrigerator and a coffee maker. They now, also, have free wifi.

I checked the current pricing on their website for the same time period and the room is near $200 per night. I checked out hotels.com and found that not only are most of the prices considerably higher, they aren't in the same area. Most of them are in Lower Manhattan which would require more travel time for destinations in Mid Manhattan.

Lower Manhattan isn't as easy to navigate as Mid Manhattan is, since Mid Manhattan is set up on a grid and Lower Manhattan's streets tend to go in unexpected directions that aren't always clearly logical.

Our hotel was just around the corner from the Empire State Building, which is on Fifth Ave between 33RD and 34TH Streets. It was the view outside our hotel window.

We went to the first observation deck of the Empire State Building, which took absolutely forever to get to. The line on the way to the observation deck is literally several floors long. The wait can take two to four hours. The employees also behave like very persistent carnival barkers. They try to sell you different tours and your own photos.

There are actually three lines that you need to go through to make it to the top. The first one is security, which you must pass to just get into the building. The second one is for ticket purchases, which you can avoid if you buy your ticket on-line, unless of course you plan to go to the top observatory.You will need to wait in line since the tickets are only sold at the building. The third line is the one that inches you toward the elevators which take you to the observation decks.

On the way back down we were given a choice of taking the elevator back down, which was running slow due to the huge crowd or walk down. We took the stairs which wasn't that bad since it was all downhill.

The view and the history written into brass plaques on the railings of the deck are worth the trip. The time on the deck is your own choice. You will find a gift shop up at the deck and several gift shops in the ground floor. Make sure to take a jacket since it is very windy and often cold on the deck. The tours run from 8am to 2am seven days a week most of the year, except for Christmas Eve when the tours stop at 10pm.

We toured the UN, which is almost 1 1/2 miles from the Korean Town area. We walked to the UN from our hotel in about a half hour. It's a very pleasant walk especially since we also did some shopping and sight seeing on the way back. There are some nice little shops and well kept, picturesque, brownstones in the area.

Guided and audio tours are run from 9:45 a.m. - 4:45 p.m, Monday through Friday. Audio tours are available Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4:15pm. They last around an hour. You must buy your tickets at the UN Visitor Center which is located on First Ave and 46TH Street. Visitors are required to go through a security check before entering the building.

The tour included several permanent exhibits and exhibit rooms as well as the General Assembly Hall, Economic and Social Council Chamber and the Security, Council Chamber, which is currently unavailable due to a remodeling being done to that building. We also went to the gift shop in the basement where we could purchase gifts from various member nations.

We shopped at Macy's, especially, in their Museum store, which is on the half floor of the first level of the store. We took photos of Macy's Christmas themed windows and Lord and Taylor's Christmas windows, which were of Christmas through the years spanning from the Victorian era up to the present time.

Both stores are on Broadway, and Macy's is located between 34TH and 35TH Streets.

We ate at the 24 hour Korean restaurant, Woorijip, which was just down from our hotel, on 32ND Street. They're set up similar to a self serve cafeteria with a hot buffet, prepackaged meals, hot and cold, and a made to order noodle cook station.

We like Little Korea. The people are friendly and open and willing to talk to strangers. There is always something going on in the street at all hours.

We originally chose the area because it was central to all the places we planned to visit. We were able to walk everywhere because the train station was just a few blocks from our hotel, the Empire State Building was around the corner and the UN was just a few blocks away.

We went again in 2008 to New York. We could only be there for the day. We traveled the same way we did in 2006. We returned to the same area because it is centrally located and because we had found the area to be friendly and relatively safe.

We decided to take the Greyline tour of the downtown loop of Manhattan. The tour originated in Times Square, which is under a mile from Penn Station, where we came in from Newark Airport. We walked down 34TH Street to Eight Ave and walked straight up to just past 47TH Street in Times Square, where the tour office is.

You can buy your ticket voucher on-line and exchange it for a ticket at the tour office. If this isn't the tour you want to take, this company has a lot of different choices to keep you busy for a long time.

The tour can take a bit over two hours if you don't get off the bus. The tours run from 8am to 6pm daily with around a twenty minute interval between buses, except for Christmas or New Years, when there are no tours.

This particular tour's stops include: Times Square, the Broadway Theater district, Macy's and Madison Square Gardens, the Empire State Building, the Flat Iron building(which was named for the original clothing irons due to its shape), Union Square, Greenwich Village, Soho, Chinatown and Little Italy, City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Center and one end of Wall Street, the American Indian Museum and the other end of Wall Street(This is where the Wall Street bull is and where our original Nation's Capitol is located.), Southstreet Seaport(I understand from some of our fellow riders that there are some nice restaurants in this area.), Lower East Side,
East Village, the UN, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Rockefeller Center and Radio City Hall, Central Park and Park Central Hotel.

We got off the tour bus five times. We shopped in China Town at Pearl River on Walker near Broadway. We got off to see the Wall Street Bull and the Museum of the American Indian. We visited Greenwich Village just to walk around and do some sight seeing. We went to the Ground Zero site and peeked in behind the barrier that's around it. There is an observation deck, but we preferred to go right up to the fence, besides we couldn't find the observation deck.

We also got off at Rockefeller Center to see the complex and also shopped at H&M, which is on the same block. I got a new winter jacket that's more suitable for my trips than the ski jacket I'd been using.

The entire trip took an additional 3 1/2 hours. So we spent over five hours on this tour. Then we got off at the tour office and walked up Eighth Ave to 48TH Street and walked toward Seventh Ave which we took to 45TH Street where we got to be in the center of Times Square. We did some sight seeing and shopping as we took Broadway towards Macy's where we did some more shopping.

We then turned on 32ND Street and went to our favorite restaurant, the Woorijip. We enjoyed a leisurely dinner before returning to Penn Station and to Newark Airport.

We flew in to Newark around 11:30am because we didn't take a direct flight. We were in New York by noon and were back on the train to the airport around 9pm. We would have arrived an hour earlier if we'd taken a direct flight.

We were able to fit that much into the day because we carefully went over the tour and what we had planned to do and budgeted our time according to where our priorities were as well as taking into account how much time it would take between each venue.

For many of the stops we took advantage of the twenty minutes between buses to time what we did before re-boarding the next bus as well as the fact that the tour had already organized the route for us. We then reserved extra time for some of the stops and for what we did after the tour, so that we were able to cover everything we wanted to do and still make it back to the airport in time.

Sources:

http://www.panynj.gov/airports/newark-liberty.html

http://www.njtransit.com/hp/hp_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=HomePageTo

https://reservations.redroof.com/additionalRates.do?action=GetRates&selectedIndex=0&propertyCode=00605

http://www.hotels.com/

http://www.esbnyc.com/index2.cfm?noflash=1

http://www.un.org/en/

http://gonyc.about.com/od/shopping/p/macys.htm

http://www.koreanbeacon.com/tag/woorijip/

http://www.newyorksightseeing.com/

http://www.rockefellercenter.com/

http://www.hm.com/us/#/startns/