NYC, part 2

Another thing I would highly recommend if you ever go to New York City is to take the 90 minute Circle Line Cruise around Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.  We were on a double decker boat (the bottom part was enclosed) and our tour guide was excellent.  He told everyone so much about the city, etc.  We started out at a pier on the Hudson river and cruised around the southern tip of the island and under all the bridges around the eastern side on the East river.  After that we cruised over to the Statue of Libery and Ellis Island but didn't dock because both were closed due to Hurricane Sandy damage. (the pictures in this post are out order)

View of Manhattan from the East river.

Times Square chaos

Space shuttle Enterprise on the ship Intrepid on the Hudson river.

Bridge (Brooklyn??) on the East river.

Ellis Island

View of the southern tip of Manhattan (financial district/battery park). The tallest building is the construction of one of the World Trade Center buildings.  I love how there is a mixture of really old buildings and new, shiny ones.

We went up in the Empire State Building right after taking the river cruise. What a day it was to be able to see so much from the water's view then up over the city!  The view above is looking out towards downtown (financial district--tallest building is again the new World Trade Center). Look to the far right and there is the Statue of Liberty. Clouds were setting in at this time.

In the lobby of Empire State Building and below a view of the Chrysler Building.  We went up to the 86th floor deck of the building.  If you pay a little extra you can go up to the 102nd floor but we figured we'd be able to see just about as much from where we were....and we didn't want to wait in line any longer.

I haven't added up what all the separate costs would have been out of pocket if we'd purchased tickets individually for all the sites we went to but I'm sure we saved a lot of money by instead purchasing a New York City Pass.  I got our passes mailed to us at home before we left.  I bought two day packages for each of us.  It allows you to go 70 different tours/sites within the time period you choose to use the passes. You can only go to each thing once but you can go to as many as you want to in the two day time period.  For instance, we chose to activate our passes on Monday so that meant from Monday until Tuesday at midnight we could cram in as many of the 70 attractions as we could get into.  It also meant passing up ticket lines at attractions and getting in quicker. Kind of like how fast passes work at amusement parks. 

It took some planning to make sure we made full use of the passes and not end up having to purchase tickets for the places we wanted to go but it was so worth it. We made a list of all the things we wanted to do then mapped out the locations so we could save time in traveling.  Once I tally up our savings I'll post it on here.  We used our NYC Pass for the Circle Line Cruise, Empire State Building, Madame Tussands, American Museum of Natural History, Top of the Rock and something else I cannot recall.  It would've been good for the Museum of Modern Art, where we also wanted to go, but that place is closed on Tuesdays and we didn't find this out until after the fact to be able to go Monday instead.  Once opened, the Pass is also good for the 9/11 Museum. 

More to come in part 3...