NYC 20160817

Bittersweet, our last day in New York.  We had a bunch of things we wanted to do today and managed to do most of them.  We started out with breakfast at what now seems to be our go to place.  We had a nice egg and toast breakfast and then started our day.  Trish had been eyeing up a store for dresses and picked up a couple.  From there we finished our bus tour which took us UpTown.  Ideally we would have done this at the beginning of our trip, but the temperature today finally dropped below feeling 40+ degrees outside and it made for a great start to the day.  Our tour operator this day was a little on the complaining side, they both had one thing in common, they were not a fan of Trump.  We zig zagged our way up Broadway bouncing between Central Park and the residences of the Upper West Side.  We saw buildings where Demi Moore currently lives (is listed though currently for $75 million), we drove by Yoko Ono's place which has about 28 rooms in it.  One of the apartments buildings there took up a whole city block that had all the suites still with the original amounts of rooms in them.  Each one had a working fire place, 2-4 bedrooms, a service entrance and a dining room with a view of the Main Street as well as their courtyard.  Many of the apartment buildings in the area were built after the subway was built on Broadway, prior to that much of the surrounding area was farm land.  We learned about Central Park which is solely man made, none of the hills or valleys or nooks are natural to the area.  The area originally was marshy and boggy, the marshes and bogs were drained, they blew up some of the rocks in the area and brought in tons of topsoil.  They planted over 250,000 trees.  None of what you see in Central Park is native to the area.  Even the lakes that are in the park are man made. The larger of the lakes is actually the resevoir for all the drinking water in New York. They estimate that the land for the park if you were to list it on the market for real estate is over 300 billion based on the square footage of land for the land alone Manhattan standards.  We also drove through some of Harlem and made our way back down on the East end of Central Park.  On the Upper East Side we drove by a few museums, the Guggenheim for example.  We saw several mansions that have now been turned mostly art galleries.

We hopped off the second to last stop and then doubled back by subway to the Amercian Natural Museum.  We wandered through the halls where Night at the Museum was filmed and enjoyed the great set ups they had.  We saw several exhibits, multiple dinosaur bones.  We found our people in the Hall of North Western Natives, Trish's from the Thompson Lillooet area and the Salish for Adam. We even managed to last minute find the Blue Whale exhibit.  Some of the funnier things that I overheard was kids remarking the Homo Sapien exhibits as Monkey Humans.

After hours of walking through the halls of the museum and probably hundreds of photos we hopped on a train to go to a Pizza place that our first tour guide advices was the best pizza in New York.  Johns Pizza on Bleecker Street was great.  The pizza was oven cooked, thin crust, a tomato sauce that was amazing.  We coudln't finish it all and brought it back to the hotel.  We were originally going to come back to our room and rip off the pizza and then head out to see if we could catch a final last minute show.  For the first time we got on the wrong train and ended up deep into Brooklyn, once we realized we were going the wrong way, we of course said we would just hop off the next stop and get on the next train back into NYC.  Turns out the next stop was not for another 10 minutes, those were a long 10 minutes, especially since we knew it will have added about another 25 minutes or so onto our trip.  We made it back to our room and decided to call it a night and watch some tv and have one of our last beers and start to pack some things up.   

Cheers New York, it has been a blast!