As regular visitors to this little slice of the internet will know, I was lucky enough the be taken by The Boy to New York for (whisper it) my 30th birthday. What a lucky girl I am! It truly is a completely fabulous city for places to explore, interesting stuff to do, things to eat and drink and to experience it at Christmas when all the Xmas decorations really topped it all off. We were there from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night – a perfect amount of time. We were also so lucky with the weather as we had crystal clear blue skies the first two days and just a little bit of rain on the last afternoon.
I visited the fabulous Sephora as well as Bath and Body Works and a few other beauty related stores, but I thought it would be nice to do a post first that just showed some of the beautiful sights we saw. We stayed at the wonderful Hotel Chambers, on 56th Street just off 5th Ave – a perfect location for all the high end shopping boutiques. We stayed in a double room which was plenty big enough to accomodate lots of shopping bags, plus a huge bathroom. Service was great – we didn’t eat at the hotel but they do have a Japanese style restaurant.
I loved this view on the way to the hotel from JFK – the unmistakeable site of skyscrapers and yellow cabs.
One of the first things we did was to head down to the Rockefeller Centre to see the famous Christmas Tree….
and the ice rink below…
Before just wandering around gazing at some of the beautiful Christmas decorations on the shops in 5th Ave. There really were so many BEAUTIFUL designs that I could fill this post up just with them, but these were some that caught my eye!
Obviously I did rather a lot of shopping and The Boy was MOST patient (he is stocking up some major brownie points, don’t you think?). I didn’t buy anything from Tiffanys but I had to visit the store – they had the most lovely window displays and an amazing view down 5th Ave from the second floor.
We also went to Central Park although we didn’t do the whole thing (would have taken far too much time). We decided not to do the horse and carriage and just walk around so we could see everything at our own pace. We also found a beautiful place in the middle by this lake (below) to have a hot chocolate by a roaring fire amid beautiful Christmas decorations.
All this walking was fuelled by one of these every morning – I absolutely LOVE American breakfasts and I pretty much stuffed my face everyday. This little bad boy included pancakes with bananas and strawberries, coffee and a side of sausage (basically like a Sausage McMuffin). Literally amazing.
We jumped in a cab and went to see Ground Zero – I really wanted to go just to see what it was like. It’s so shocking to see the height of the buildings that survived and realise how tall the Twin Towers stood – and what a huge loss of life occured on that day. It’s hard now to imagine the devastation – the Towers were in the gap of blue sky in the picture below.
We also walked down Wall Street and looked out towards the Brookyn bridge before walking down the the Staten Island ferry. We did see the Statue of Liberty although it looked pretty small and far away. At least we saw it – we were going to take the ferry but decided it would take too much time out of the day.
Finally, although we saw so many beautiful window displays from Macys, Saks and the many other high end store dotted across New York, Bergdorf Goodman created some absolutely exquisite designs – I just had to show you this, one of many displays that were just utterly sumptious.
So there were some highlights of my trip… I have probably left out loads, like the amazing meal for my birthday at Abe and Arthurs in the Meatpacking district alongside some ridiculously good cocktails (I literally fell into a cab back to the hotel!), seeing Times Square at night for the first time and wondering at the sheer scale of the skyscrapers. It was a fabulous birthday treat and I cannot wait to go back. I definitely love, love, LOVE, New York.
Clare x
