Our
First Trip – New York City
The boys were having a sleepover and, at
drop-off, we decided to have a glass of wine and get better acquainted. It was
during this evening that it was decided where our first adventure would take
place – we were New York bound. The Big Apple, The Empire State, The City That
Never Sleeps. If you can make it here….and we did!
We were looking to have a nice vacation, but
not spend a huge amount of money. Although we had some trepidation, as we didn’t know each other too well
(yet) and New York hotel rooms are cozy, we were all in and the boys were hyped
to be traveling together.
One of the first things we do when
planning our vacation is to hit the library for guide books. This gives us a
good way to decide what should be on our list of things to do without costing
anything. Deciding what part of the city to stay in was a bit overwhelming, as
there are so many options. We eventually decided on the Times Square area, due
to its central location and proximity to many of the sights on our list. We chose a Holiday Inn Express due to its free
breakfast (very important to us) and free wifi (very important to the boys). Once
the trip was booked, we surprised the boys over dinner by giving them NYC
tshirts, which we had to explain the significance of. We weren’t sure who was
more excited about the trip, them or us…… nah, we knew we were more excited.
Our next step was to research things to
do and a less expensive way to do them. We decided to purchase City Passes for
our trip, which we got through Costco for an even bigger savings. We liked the
City Pass because not only did it give us free admission to the places we
wanted to see, we could skip the lineups. Another advantage to this was that it
was already paid for before we left so we could control our spending once on
the trip. After some research, we decided the cheapest flights available were
through Buffalo, which is only an hour across the border from us in Ontario,
Canada. We packed our own snacks and drinks to save on airport and airline
prices. We opted to park at the Buffalo Airport, using a coupon code we found
online. For transportation to the hotel from the Airport we chose a shuttle but
discovered that we shared this shuttle with quite a few people all staying at
different hotels, ours being the last stop it made. On future trips, we made
better decisions having this knowledge.
The day before we left, in the midst of
preparing and packing, we learned of the death of Robin Williams. We, like
everyone else it seemed, were shocked and saddened by the news. This was not
the last we would hear of this tragedy during our trip.
Next……
our vacation starts.
