NYC Day 1: Times Square, Shake Shack, Chelsea Market

View of Times Square as we cross the street to our hotel.

View from hotel window looking straight out.

View from hotel window looking down.

Mandi broke the elevator. Haha!

Times Square

Mandi, Becky, Marianne, Jenn, and I in front of Carlo's Bakery. (Which is from the reality TV show Cake Boss, which I have not seen or heard of, but these ladies were excited about it.)

Mandi, Becky, Krystal, Jenn in Times Square.

Marianne was our navigator, she's the queen of Google Maps and made sure we never got lost for very long. 

More Times Square

More Times Square

Marianne, Mandi, and Jenn, trying to figure out the Subway map. 

Dinner at Shake Shack, just as good or better than all the hype.

Mandi, Becky, Marianne, and Jenn at the entrance to Chelsea Market.

Marianne and Jenn in Chelsea Market

A sign listing all the shops in Chelsea Market.

An interesting water feature in Chelsea Market

Trying to decide which shops to look at first.

We found Magnolia Bakery on the way back the hotel. (This bakery is also in a bunch of TV shows I've never seen, and is said to be the place that the "cupcake craze" of the 90s came from.)

I woke up at 4:45am this morning. Voluntarily. On purpose. I had a plane to catch, and I wasn't going to miss it for anything. 

Back when we lived in Springville, I was in a Relief Society presidency for about 3 years with some of the best ladies around. When I moved, they called another wonderfully gal into the presidency. It's getting about time for them to be released, and so they all planned an amazing trip together, and invited me to come along too! 

New York City.

I've been looking forward to it for months. And today was the day. Jenn and I got to Mandi's house at 6:00am on the dot, and we three loaded Mandi's car, picked up Marianne and Becky on the way, and off to the airport we went. 

A couple hours in the SLC airport, a 4.5 hour flight, and our adventure was underway. The airport was pretty typical airport scene, but once we stepped off the Air-Train into the Subway station, we were in a whole other world. 

I've ridden transportation in cities before, DART in Dallas, BART in San Francisco, and the Metro-Link in St. Louis, and SLC's good ol' Trax and Front Runner.......but the Subway in New York was an entirely new and complex animal. 

For one thing, the system is MASSIVE, there are so many lines, and options of places to go. And there are levels,  train platforms on top of train platforms on top of train platforms. My brain was wheeling. And I'm sure my eyes were as big as the moon, just trying to take in all the sights, sounds, smells....

Oh yes SMELLS everywhere! Smell is a very tangible sense in New York. It's unlike anything I've ever experienced. Good smells, bad smells, inviting, repulsive, food smells, people smells, city smell... all of it changing entirely with every step you took. One second roasting meat, then a puff of cigarette smoke, rain, exhaust from a car, baking bread, something sweet, walk over a sewer grate, past a flower shop, a bar...you can smell it all, coming at you one at time in little flighty wafts, here and then gone, almost before you can register what it was in the first place. All of New York City was like that with the smells, not just the Subway stations. But the subway was where I encountered it for the first time. 

We found our hotel, the Doubletree Hotel in Times Square, without any trouble though, thanks to Mandi and Marianne, who were excellent navigators. We were on the 37th floor, and the view out the window was just crazy.....buildings everywhere you turned. That's how all of Times Square is actually.....and really all of NYC. I am still in awe at the number and height of the buildings that are there. Every street you turn down is sky-high buildings as far as you can see. 

First priority after dropping our luggage at the hotel was dinner. And we'd sort of made an unofficial pact that we weren't going to eat anywhere in NY that we could eat at in UT. At first, I thought that might prove to be hard, but turns out, not hard at all. There are so many shops, street vendors, cafes, markets, bakeries, restaurants.....thy sky was really the limit, and you could have any kind of food you could dream up. It's all there waiting to be tasted and enjoyed. 

Shake Shack was on someone's "must do" list, and it was close to where we were, so we decided to go. It was PACKED. But it was fantastic. Possibly the best burger and fries I've ever eaten.....but I was pretty hungry, and that might have factored in.  

Next we ventured out to find Chelsea Marker, which was on Marianne's "must-see" list. Chelsea Market reminded me a lot of Pike's Place Market in Seattle. It's underground, and is a collection of little specialty shops and restaurants and bakeries and such. The atmosphere is really cool, and there are lots of things to look at. We planned to come back another night at eat dinner or lunch there, but we never did. 

Next we stopped at a market/grocery story, and bought yogurt to take back to the hotel for breakfasts and bottled water to take with us on our adventures the next day. 

Then is was late, and we were all tired from traveling, so we headed back to the hotel. We watched an NBA playoff game, ate snacks, and talked and laughed our heads off.