NYC - The Planning Stage

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Deciding to take a trip to New Your City was both super exciting and extremely overwhelming. I mean, it's the Big Apple, The City that Never Sleeps, The Capital of the World. So much to see, so much to do, so little time to do it all.
Obviously the first step when planning a trip like this is figuring out how and when you're going to get there. For us we decided to go December 26th - 31st. Right in between the two major holidays. I'm sure for a lot of people these dates may seem weird. Why not spend the holidays in the big city? But it turned out to be the perfect situation for us; plus it allowed us to get good prices on flights. Win win.
Once the flights were booked we then moved on to finding a place to stay. Easier said than done. The area is just huge, and there are sooooo many different options. We decided to go through Airbnb and, after scanning through all the many MANY available listings, we got one narrowed down, contacted the owner and booked it. Unfortunately a few weeks prior to our vacation the owner contacted us saying the unit was no longer available because his plans had changed and he would need to stay there during our exact dates. Talk about a bummer. It was kind of a mad scramble from there to try to find something decent in such short notice. But we were able to find an awesome hotel in a great location. The NYMA is where we ended up staying. Like I said, the location was great, not too far from Penn Station and other metro stops, plus the view from our window looked straight up at the Empire State Building. Not bad, not bad at all.
Now that the two major purchases were out of the way it was time to get down to the nitty-gritty details and actually plan out our days. I, luckily, have a handful of friends who have both visited and liked in Manhattan and were able to give me great tips and advice on how to spend our time. Probably the best resource for planning was a map my friend (who lived in NYC while getting a Master's Degree) made me with all the major tourist attractions highlighted. So, I figured I'd pass that information on for all to see.
Once we looked over the map, did a bit of research on our own, and talked to others who had also vacationed to NYC, we were able to make a daily breakdown. This is how the it looked:
DAY 1: St. Patrick's cathedral, Apple Store/5th Ave, Grand Central Station, NY Library/Bryant Park
DAY 2: 911 Museum, Brooklyn Bridge, Broadway Washington Square? Canal Street?
DAY 3: Museum of Natural History, Hayden Planetarium, Central Park, The Plaza Hotel, Serendipity, Carnegie Hall
DAY 4: Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, Washington square? Canal street?
DAY 5: Times Square, High Line Park, Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building
Day 6: Lincoln Center, Skyline Park, MET
This tentative itinerary was based mostly off of location; we tried to stick the attractions that were all close together geographically on the same day so we wouldn't waste time and energy criss-crossing all over the city. If you read the post about how the trip actually went, you'll see that we didn't quite follow the plan.
The awesome thing about traveling in the 21st century is that all the attractions have their own websites with all the info you need to know to plan a visit. How did people travel before the internet or iPhones?? The Hubs and I talk about this a lot, I mean can you imagine? Anyways, once you have an idea of what you want to see it's just a matter of googling them all and finding the cost, opening hours, expected time spent at each attraction etc. From there you can really start to nail down what you want and will be able to accomplish in a day.
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Transportation. Again, total nightmare without smart phones. We ended up flying in and out of the Newark, NJ airport (cheaper) but it's quite simple to catch a train right into Penn Station. We looked online at the MTA website prior to leaving just to get ourselves acquainted with the system. Each subway station has kiosks where you can purchase a Metro Card and add funds to the card. We got the 7-day Unlimited card and it was nice to not have to think about the balance left on our cards for the remainder of our stay.
As far as navigating the subway system goes, google maps has made it extremely easy. We'd just plug our destination into the app on our phones, make sure the setting was on public transportation, and it'd spit out step by step instructions on how to get there. The first few trips may be a bit confusing, downloading (or a screenshot) a map of the subway system can be helpful. What you really need to remember is which direction you'll be headed so you know which side of the platform to get on. Is it uptown towards the Bronx or downtown to lower Manhattan/Brooklyn. Don't get me wrong, we definitely had a few missteps along the way. At one point we found ourselves way out in Queens! Having the unlimited pass and the magical smart phone at your fingertips makes it pretty hard to get completely lost though.

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