Sightseeing day today, travelling on the hop-on hop-off bus.
As part of the New York sights pass, I had the 2 day hop-on hop-off bus tickets, today we were doing Downtown, tomorrow was uptown.
This is a great way of quickly seeing NY if you have a limited time! Lots of good sights to catch. Since we had already done a bit of downtown, we stayed on till the Rockefella cente, which was almost the entire loop!
It was around midday when we got around to Rockefella centre. Got off and headed for lunch in the plaza. Located a nice Italian place, Harry’s Italian, they made fresh pasta and pizza.
(Harry’s Italian lunch – mushroom pizza slice, chicken parma with pasta)
Was a good hearty lunch, then off to the top of Rockefella centre. Unfortunately the next available slot was 1.5 hours later – this was actually better than Chicago where you simply had to wait, an allocated time was much better, got out tickets for that slot.
A good opportunity finish off Grand Central Station in that duration. Was a short 10 minute brisk walk.
Got to the famous Grand Central station – had seen this place many times in the Madagascar movie with kids, finally seeing it in real!
Quite a large station, would have loved to explore the place a bit more however we were running on a tight schedule, made our way back to the Rockefella centre and walked straight through the queues up to the top of the ROCK! Great having a timeslot ticket.
What a view from the top, the Rock provides the best views to Central Park and also to downtown NY including views to the famous Empire State Building!
Tip: The Rock provides the best aerial view of Central park of all the observation decks here in NY. Better to see the Empire state building from here!
Got down to street level, time to wait for the Hop-on bus to come by. Whilst waiting for the bus, headed across the street to Bouchon Bakery for a quick hydration. This one turned out to be my fav bakery.
Back on to the Bus, next stop, Empire State Building. A smaller queue here 
.
Views from the Empire State were good however we preferred the views from the ROCK. Still not bad.
Back on street level, we had done the downtown sights for the day, made our way towards Macy’s @ Herald Square – why not! Along the way Nita’s phone rang, it was a facebook call from Vipul! He had seen our pics on FB and decided to call Nita just to have a chat on how we were going and whether we were here attending the wedding in Orlando! He was keeping a tab on us
.
(Nita on FB call with Vipul!)
Next was Macy’s time! The tour guide on the hop-on bus had given a bit of a background on the founders of Macy’s, apparently the husband and wife had died on the Titanic – not sure how true that was??
Was close to 9:30pm when we got out of there, took the red subway to 50th st and then a short walk to our fav Mexican joint in NY on 9th Ave – Casa Agave. It was around 10 pm when we got there, place was busy as usual, found a table and ordered our fav fresh Guacamole and Fajita – YUM!
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