Traveling is always kind of a headache for me, but really exciting at the same time. I WANT to travel. I long to go around the world and immerse myself in different cultures and people groups. I am too fascinated by it all to be embarrassed about being a tourist. I don't feel too uncomfortable stepping into a new environment, and in moments where I do get uncomfortable, I know it's not the end of the world.
I know very few people who don't enjoy traveling and seeing new places. I don't, however, know a single person who wouldn't love to visit New York City! It's big, its boujee, its full of life and excitement and, it's for EVERYONE. Literally. There is a nook in the city for every people group.
The life of the city breathed life back into my lungs. I wanted to stay forever, to find my place, to see what I could do as a New Yorker (and seeing a celebrity or two would not have been the worst thing in the world).
All that being said, there is way too much to do in New York for you to do EVERYTHING. Trust me. According to the random article I read one early morning when insomnia set in and I planned my entire trip, it would take about 4 years to eat at every NYC restaurant alone.
If you want to squeeze every little bit out of your trip, (and you are a hard 1 on the Enneagram, like me) you refer to the list, and the list is your life. What made my time even a little bit easier for me was the pregame planning I did the 2 weeks before I arrived. I broke my prep down into three categories, for your sake, and for mine: The big picture, the zoom in, and the play-by-play.
The Big picture
I sat down and wrote every single thing I wanted to do. Things like Times Square, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, a Broadway Show and Chelsea Market were definitely on there. Basically, anything that I could think of in New York off the top of my head went on the list. I just wrote it down. It didn't matter if it was in Brooklyn, The Bronx or Manhattan, it was on the list. This gave me a really good overview of the trip and I used this as an outline for the rest of my pregame planning.
The Zoom - In
Next, I went borough by borough. If you don't know anything about New York, like what a borough is, I would back all the way up, and read up on some of the NYC layout, the metro system, anything. This will help you get your bearings and helps you sound less like a dummy when you step out of JFK. If you know what's up, however, this step is probably the best.
Most likely you are going to derail your plans at least once (if not days in a row) when in the big apple, and that is totally fine. Having at least some idea of what is in the city you're standing in really helps though.
In this step, I took everything on my "big pictures" list and divided it by borough. Once I knew what things were in the same boroughs, I grouped them even more by the part of the borough they were in. For example, a lot of the touristy stuff is in Manhattan, but its quite a drive from upper to lower Manhatten, and a lot to see in between. You can go from upper to lower if you want but grouping things district by district will help you know what's in the area around you. This step also helps you plan out your day. Maybe one day you want to hit the top 3 districts in the lower half of Manhatten, before heading over the Brooklyn Bridge to DUMBO. This step is where that is planned.
Play-By-Play
This step is where I went ham. Starting from my hotel, I google mapped every single place I wanted to visit, street by street. I pinpointed how far each place was to the next and calculated the easiest route through the city from point A to point B, both by car and by metro. Again, I went ham. Then I set up my list of "Things To See" in order of how close they were from where I was standing at the moment. For example, our hotel was connected to Grand Central Station so it would make sense that we saw that before anything else because it was so close. We could use that to take any metro train anywhere we wanted, or walk right down the street to the public library. Walking the other way, we could see the Chrysler building, and the list goes on and on.
Not gonna lie, we ditched this part of the plan as soon as we got to New York, and that was more for convenience than anything. This step was not a total waste, though. I remembered a lot of the layout of the city from spending a few hours with google maps, and by the end of the week, I felt more confident traveling on foot.
Another suggestion that we looked into while planning our New York trip was buying things pre-advanced. Our Broadway Show tickets and our Madison Square Garden tickets were purchased before we ever arrived. When it comes to ticketing in the city, better safe than sorry. You don't want to place all your bets that there will be tickets available for purchase 2 hours before the event your looking into starts. There are millions of people in New York, and they actually enjoy doing things in their city. Save yourself some heartbreak, and buy tickets beforehand.
Look into buying things like a bus pass, metro card, Uber gift cards. My family and I did not do the bus pass that this time around, but those red double-decker buses are so classic, it's worth buying even 1 go around on it. We were able to purchase our metro cards from our debit card at the metro station. It is like an ATM machine type deal. Also, we used every single cent of our Uber Gift Cards, and they were worth it!
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Whether you spend the time to make a list of things to see and do like the one I did, or you don't, your time in New York City won't be wasted. Even though there is a lot to do, you see more places than you think. There was A L O T on my list when my family and I went, and by day 4, we had done almost all of it. That being said, if there are things you don't get to, put them on your "next time" list. This is a list I started building while we were still in NYC. This helps to spread your trip out, take the stress of seeing everything (not possible) off, and have fun.
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