So remember how yesterday I said that we found parking straight away. Today was a little bit of a different story. We learned (the hard way) that you can drive around NYC for up to 3 hours looking for a spot to park! We eventually found one, but it was a spot that was technically only available an hour after we found it (for street cleaning purposes). So we ended up sitting in the car for an EXTRA hour just incase a cop came up and told us to move. We’d rather that than a ticket. SO FOUR HOURS later….. our day in NYC began.

We had a tonne of plans to do some of the free walking tours, but we missed the first two (boo!) and the next one wasn’t until later in the evening.

So we were hungry and stumbled upon a very famous Restaurant.

1. Toms Restaurant

Yayy! The famous place from hit TV sitcom, Seinfeild! It was pretty cool eating inside here. The booths looked very familiar. It’s a greek restaurant so we both ordered some yummy greek food, and tried a cookies and cream milkshake. It hit the spot!

2. Central Park

After driving around for three hours, and sitting in the car for the fourth hour, we just felt like relaxing. So we went to Central Park and stayed there for a few hours. We went to the Park Lake and took some snaps there. Then we went to little park where there was a live band playing, which was super nice (and kinda romantic) so we sat there and got some ice cream / snow cones and relaxed a bit more.

Then we wandered on over to Bow Bridge, you know, the romantic bridge that’s in all the movies and stuff. Yea, expectation was this glorious bridge, but the reality was that it was closed and under construction (wahh!!). Oh well, these things happen.

3. LAND Thai Restaurant

We had an early dinner (and dessert) before our walking tour started. We needed some energy! We found this awesome Thai Restaurant called LAND. I had the Drunken Chicken, and Drikus ordered some Curry. Both dishes were amazing and full of flavour. For dessert, Sticky Mango Rice Pudding. My favourite. We chilled there a bit then headed back to Central Park for our walking tour.

4. Photography Walking tour of Central Park

This tour was both good and bad. Good because we got a full tour of most of Central Park and we got to take some pretty spectacular photos. Bad, because it’s a free tour so the guy wasn’t really professionaly trained and it got a bit quiet and awkward at times. Also it was supposed to be a two hour tour, and it ended up going way longer (like 90 minutes) longer than that! So we were exhausted by the end of it.

My highlights though:

1. We saw our first Racoons! You know how much I love animals

2. We saw a turtle that was over 150 years old. Seriously, I thought it was an aligator at first, it was huge. Up close, it looks like the things out of nightmares, but when you stop to think about how incredible it is that a creature like this is living in the middle of NYC it’s pretty breathtaking.

But seriously….

3. I managed to get a good shot of Bow Bridge, minus the construction. With some creative angles I got a pretty good shot of the romantic bridge at sunset. I’m happy with that.

All in all, it was another, long day. But we kinda relaxed and didn’t do as much stuff (even though we would have liked to) I guess it all worked out well in the end!