NYC Day 2 (Part 3)

I am pretty sure I mentioned that Tuesday was a very long day for us. I did not actually realize how much we fit into the day until I started writing about it. So after a brief rest in the hotel we dug down deep to find some energy to continue on. It was time to finally check out the inside of St. Patrick's Cathedral. What an amazing site! It was absolutely huge with so much fine detail as you should be able to see from the pictures. Mom made sure to light a prayer candle and we walked around admiring everything. From there it was time to check out some of the other historic landmarks of the city. Some of which were closer than others as we would soon find out.

We just kept heading down 5th Ave. until we ran into Grand Central Terminal. At first we were all calling it Grand Central Station, then we happened to read it is actually a Terminal, not a station. Just a little fyi for any trivia you might run into. We stood at the top of the steps of one of the entrances and took the picture of all the people you see walking around. It was very busy and crazy to see people hurrying from corner to corner to get to their next destination. There is a lot going on in that place, from trains coming and going, to restaurants, to shopping. We walked through and came out the side that faces the Chrysler Building (the wiki page). We did not go in but just stopped and stared for awhile.

Then we started walking some more with no real plan in mind. We knew we would keep running into things along the way wherever we went. The next building we came across was the New York Public Library. Unfortunately it was undergoing some rehab so as you can see, did not look too spectacular. Without knowing it the Empire State Building smacked us in the face. We took a couple pictures and looked at it for a bit since that was on the agenda for Thursday morning (Day 4). Before we knew it we were at 34th St., 20 blocks from where we started at the hotel (20 blocks=1 mile). We realized the biggest Macy's store was somewhere close and obviously our confusion was showing on our faces as a nice lady asked us if we needed help. Of course we would have figured it out eventually but it was refreshing to experience the kindness in such a busy city.

The Macy's was very neat to see since up to that point we had only viewed it on tv during the Thanksgiving Day Parade each year. We did go inside to check it out and enjoyed a warm cup of coffee/tea at the Starbucks inside. After walking around for a few minutes and realizing it looked like most Macy's we stepped back outside and down the street to Madison Square Garden. This is home to the New York Knicks NBA basketball team and just so happened to be hosting the Men's Big East Conference Basketball Tournament (the conference University of South Florida belongs to, where Ashley and Kim went to college) while we were there. We thought about trying to find tickets to the USF game that was taking place that night, but realized we could not feel our legs and should probably make our way back to the hotel. On the way back we took note of the huge U.S. Post Office and thought Ashley's Dad and Aunt Debby would appreciate seeing it.

Needless to say it was a long walk back to the hotel. The perfect ending to our second day was to experience some original New York style pizza. New York pizzerias are probably the only thing that out numbers the Starbucks in the city. We happened to have one of the more famous ones near our hotel. It is called "Famous Original Ray's Pizza." I am also giving you the link to the Wikipedia page on Ray's Pizza since there is some background to the whole debate of which Ray's Pizza is actually the original. Whether the pizza we got was from the actual original joint or not did not matter to us. All that we cared was that the pizza was absolutely, positively fantastic. It was a very large pizza and we were each afforded two wonderful pieces of pie (as the pizza is actually referred).

After filling our stomachs our bodies were more than happy to lie down and watch tv the rest of the night. We would need a good nights rest because the next day would turn out to have a little more walking than originally planned. It might be a couple of days before the next post as Ashley and I will be on the set of an upcoming George Clooney movie. That is all I can say about that.