New York City Part I

So this past weekend I went to New York City for the first time ever in my life. Yay! Now for those of you who live on the east coast visiting NYC is not anything new. People in this area visit it all the time because it is so easy to get to. However, for a midwestern it's exciting. Therefore, this blog will be in multiple posts because not only was the trip great but to fully understand the experience you need to understand the events beforehand.

This was a four month trip in the making. My friend Sarah and I had first talked about going in October but decided that would not work. Then we looked at going over President's Day in November. After a day of research and calling hotels this fell through as well. Now, before I go on I want to talk about the hotel search. Finding inexpensive hotels in New York is difficult when you've never been there before. Especially because the nice inexpensive ones are usually far away, like in New Jersey or Conneticut, etc. So therefore, we asked around and were given five recommendations of nice inexpensive places on Manhattan. So we called them and sadly none were available for November. We then looke up the next three day weekend and found MLK day in January. (So yes, everyone, we knew it would be cold). Then the hotel process began again and lo and behold we found one available that we both liked. It is called the Pod Hotel and is located in a great neighbor in Upper Midtown near Rockefellar Center. It is for people who are planning on not spending lots of time in the hotel, which we didn't, and is very afforable (only costing us about $120 a piece for two nights- which is a great deal for NY). This hotel is not for everyone, older adults most likely. It caters to the hip, chic younger crowd and has rooms in all sizes. Since Sarah and I were going to be there mainly to sleep the bunk bed room would suffice.

After we got the hotel taken care of we then began to look for broadway tickets. We discussed whether we wanted to see Wicked, Lion King, Stomp, or Rent. I presonally wanted to see either Wicked or Lion King. Well, Wicked tickets were definitely out of the price range so we concentrated on acquiring LK tickets instead. Well thanks to some guy on ticketmaster we got great seats for a great price. The tickets were for the Sunday matinee show and placed us in the second level, seven rows back from the ledge right smack in the center. I had no heads in the way, the people didn't look tiny and I could hear remarkably well. They were great seats and an absolutely amazing show.

So now that we had the hotel booked and Broadway ticekts we needed transportation. Well DC has several buses that run from NYC to DC for very cheap. We knew we were going to take the bus and so we needed to find the best one based on our location here in DC and to the hotel in NY. That fell to Eastern Travel Bus and we purchased our round trip ticekts for a whopping $45. That's right... 45 bucks there and back.. that's $22.50 each way... talk about cheap. Needless to say it is possible to get to have fun in NYC on a limited budget, especially if you don't go to a show, but who can pass up Broadway.

Stay tuned... next you'll hear about the trip...