New York Day 3: New York by Foot

One of the other good things about our hotel was the free continental breakfast each morning down in the cafe area.

After breakfast, we headed out by foot to walk the 6-7 blocks north to Rockefeller Center. On the way, we passed lots of Christmas decorations.

And we passed by some well-known venues.

We reached the entrance to Top of the Rock and yet another long line that we were able to bypass due to our online ticket purchase. We were ushered straight in to the elevators and up to the 70th floor. It wasn't nearly as cold and windy at the top as I thought it would be. It was overall a surprisingly mild day for NYC winter.

View towards the Empire State Building.

To the right, on the edge of the Hudson, you can see the faint image of the Statue of Liberty.

View towards Brooklyn.

View towards Central Park.

We saw when we arrived that they were about to start pictures with Santa and we thought that might be a cool thing to do...until we found out the price. We passed on that, visited the gift shop, and made our way to the ground floor level. While looking for a place inside Rockefeller to have lunch, we stumbled across the ice rink and famous Christmas tree. We had a good view out of the cold and crowd.

Still looking for a place to eat, we asked a security guard for a recommendation. He gave us directions to Bill's Bar and Burgers where we enjoyed good burgers, fries, and Cokes. Leaving there, we came out the nearest street level entrance/exit.

Convenient for us, we came out right across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral.

We came out of the Cathedral and Saks Fifth Avenue was just next door. Saks was supposed to be one of the stores with fancy Christmas windows and decorations but they didn't seem out of the ordinary to us.

Mom posing like the model.

After several hours of walking, we decided on some rest time in the hotel before our evening activities started. So rather than walking the 6-7 blocks back to the hotel, we hailed a pedicab.

Our evening activities included the 7p showing of Moulin Rouge at the nearby Al Hirschfield Theatre. I had made a pre-show reservation at a Cuban restaurant in the Theatre District but decided it was likely too much extra walking. I canceled that and thought we could pop in to a pizza place recommended by a work friend. We headed out of our hotel and thru Times Square to get there.

We arrived at the pizza place to see a line clear around the block. Obviously that wasn't going to work. Luckily, we found a little restaurant on the corner called Smith's Bar and Restaurant. They had open tables and a quick food turnaround.

We had a few minutes to kill before going to the theatre so we did some shopping at the I Heart NY store nearby. We picked out several items that we wanted to come back and get later then made our way over to the theatre to wait for entry.

The theatre was much smaller than I was expecting and handicap access was atrocious (as we found overall in NY) but it was beautiful inside and our seats were outstanding.

I wasn't expecting much from the show as I don't consider myself a musical person but this performance was outstanding. From the dancing to the singing to the song choice, it was highly entertaining and changed my mind about musical theatre.