NYC | Day 1

I am so excited to finally blog about our trip to NYC (3 weeks go...). We seriously had the best time and saw so much in our short time there. Before I get into it, I want to give you some back story. At Stephen's company, certain people are able to "put their names in" to go to conferences to represent the company. Since Stephen is constantly working, he hasn't been able to throw his name in; well, a NY opportunity presented itself in the form of an Astronomy conference and Stephen was finally able to request to go - and he got picked! Immediately, we talked about me tagging along and turning it into a NYC trip. Stephen's never had the desire to visit NYC, but I've been dying to go so in his mind, why not go when half the trip is paid for!? ;)

So with 2 weeks notice, we got to planning an actual vacation around his conference. It worked out that the conference was on a Saturday and Sunday but Stephen was uneasy with me going into the city alone. Cue my sister being the best sister ever and deciding to use her birthday gift from my parents as a plane ticket to spend the weekend with me so I could come into the city - and really stay with one of her good friends who lives in the city.

So overall, we flew in Friday morning and drove into the city, drove out to the conference location Friday afternoon, spent 2 days in New Jersey and then returned to the city Monday and Tuesday before flying out Wednesday morning. It was the perfect amount of time (although, I wouldn't complain about 1 more day there ;)) and we had so much fun exploring!

Now, I'm finally going to tell you about day 1 lol We were up at like 3:30 am in order to catch our early morning flight to JFK. Once we got there, Stephen needed a rental car for his work priorities so we decided to spend the day in southern Manhattan. I figured the driving should be easier (it wasn't bad!) and we could hit everything in the financial district at once. We parked right near the New One World Trade Center so we visited the memorial before grabbing lunch at a local Irish Pub - the food was alright.

It was sooo cold, windy and rainy - it was drizzling after lunch so we ran into a few stores before going out to explore. We saw the Trade Center memorials again and then explored Wall Street, Trinity Church, NYSE and Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty. We headed out that afternoon and drove out to the conference location and setup Stephen's booth. Afterwards, we decided to eat at Olive Garden because I had a gift card lol Afterwards we headed back to the hotel and crashed after an early morning.

I kept thinking of National Treasure with Trinity Church! I'm sure Stephen heard me say "Heree at the Wall" like 100 times

Inside of Tiffany's on Wall Street... little did I know this wasn't THE Tiffany's

Straight ahead, way in the distance, you can see the Statue of Liberty

And one last shot of NJ

Linking up with Jessi