Pre-Christmas NYC

Our original flight plan from Shymkent was taking us to 2 days in New York City. Due to the delays and mix-ups we ended up having only 24 hours to check it out. We landed in NYC on the 23rd of December at around 5 pm. We pre-bought tickets to the Empire State Building (with the VIP line jump) and the GreyLine double decker bus tour. Amazingly, we were able to cram in both activities plus a little more!

Pizza from Famous Ray's on 7th Ave.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn on Fifth Avenue. It was close to most everything we wanted to see, even though the rooms were a bit small. Here's the view from the 10th story:

Pizza and deli sandwiches were on the menu as NYC is famous for both. Finding a pizza place open past 9 pm on some of the side streets around us was difficult, but we managed to wander into one just off Times Square, which happened to be only 3 blocks away.

Rockefeller Center was only a 6 block walk as well, so after dinner we headed that way. Beware! The lights turn off around 11:30 pm and there was a lot of groaning and booing from the crowd. Luckily, we made it there around 11 pm and had plenty of time to take pictures:

Several of the department stores have over-the-top winter displays during the holiday season. We were only able to make it to Saks Fifth Avenue, but the display was awesome! Each window was filled with animatronics of yeti and people, and told a story about a talented snowflake-making yeti that made his way to the Big Apple to create snow for Saks. Although we didn't capture every window, here are a few glimpses of those we did:

The hotel provided breakfast in the morning, which was perfect for our early morning jaunt to the Empire State Building. We were told that it gets busy quick, and we had to leave the hotel at 2 pm in order to make our flight. The viewing balconies open at 8 am and we arrived around 8:15. The lines were minimal - thank goodness - and we were able to make it up to both viewing balconies and out in around an hour.

Lower Manhattan

In the middle-top of this picture is a glimpse of the rounded building of Madison Square Garden.

Chrysler Building

On the left, if you follow the H&M building down, just to the left of it you can see a bright light - that's Times Square. In the upper-right of this photo is Central Park.

We really wanted to take the subway up to the check-in site for GreyLine bus tours, but to save time we hopped in a taxi. We were able to hop on the 10:15 bus loop that would take us by the 9/11 tower site, Statue of Liberty, SoHo, and many other locations on our list to visit. We knew that we didn't have enough time to get off the bus to visit each location, but at least we could take pictures and say, "we've been there."

We left Shymkent, Kazakhstan on December 20th, and finally on the 24th of December we would be landing in Denver, Colorado, home. The trip was full of ups and downs, but we were really glad to be home finally!