New York Day 7: Central Park and the Trip Home

Our flight didn't leave until that evening, so we had some time to still go do a little bit of site seeing!  We got our bags packed and checked out of our hotel.  Since they were super awesome, they let us leave our bags there until it was time for us to head to the airport.  We still needed to go to Central Park before we left!  

Our New York City Pass had the option of a bike tour through Central Park, so that was our plan.  However, we got held up a little bit.  We were going to take the subway up as close as we could to where the bike rental shop was.  We ended up walking through a gate in the subway station to trains that would have taken us the wrong direction, so we walked back out and down to where we needed to be...however, we forgot that our Metro Cards had restrictions on how soon they could be used again.  We were pretty sure the restriction was on using them in same station.....which, I totally get why there is a restriction, but are you telling me that a New Yorker never goes through the wrong gate?  Maybe they don't.  Anyway, we booked it down to the next station and our cards still didn't work!  Apparently it's just a time restriction and not a station thing.  We weren't that far away from the park at this point so we just kept booking it!

The bike tours are limited to a certain number of people, and we didn't make it in time!  We were able to just do a bike rental option instead.  We had 3 hours with the bikes.  It was kind of interesting trying to navigate our way through the park.  First of all it's HUGE and second of all....we knew nothing about it to start with :)

The things we were able to find include the "famous" fountain that is in every movie or show based or filmed in NYC, the mall, the carousel, Belevdere Castle, Strawberry Feilds...and probably some other stuff!  Just enjoy the pictures!

This place is amazing to me!  I know we didn't even touch the surface of what we could have found there!  Oh, one quick anecdote.  When we were at the fountain we started seeing people dressed up as strange comic book/fantasy creatures.  We realized comic con was starting either that day or the next, and all these people had gone all out on their costumes and makeup!  They were there taking pictures at the fountain too.  It was crazy!

After we turned our bikes in we decided to see if we could go on a tour of Carnegie Hall.  Unfortunately they weren't doing tours that day due to a rehearsal.  So we saw the front entryway, and that was about it!

Then we got some lunch at a pretty tasty mexican fusion (I guess that's what you'd cal it) place.  We headed back to the hotel to meet our shuttle to the airport.  We did the Super Shuttle again.  It was our understanding that they put you on a shuttle with other people headed your same direction.  There was only one other person in the shuttle when we got picked up, so we had a lot of stops to make through out the city.  I was sooooo exhausted.  I couldn't keep my eyes open.  I really tried!  We saw some amazing neighborhoods.  Then they took us to LaGuardia Airport (which was not where our flight was leaving from) and everyone except for us got off the shuttle!  This lead us to have a moment or 5 of panic!  We were clear on the other side of city from JFK (which is where our flight was leaving from) and it was rush hour.  We were a little bit concerned about having enough time to make our flight.  Luckily the airport was not as busy as people had warned us it would be, so we had plenty of time!  We bought some snacks and settled in for our wait.  We had discovered Crumbs bakery in the financial district and it looked like the "local people" like it.  They had some giant cupcakes!  So, we brought some home with us to share with our friends who took us too and from the airport.  

P.S. Look at those awesome subway pictures at the top!  That was our last subway train pulling in!

We were sad to be going home but honestly, I'm not sure we could have survived many more days!  At least I'm not sure I could have.  I was sooooo exhausted!  This was definitely not one of those relaxing trips.  Looking back now, I really can't believe how mush we did!  It was so much fun though!  Totally worth it!

I feel like I need some words of wisdom to end this post or something.  I'll just say congratulations to anyone who is still reading this blog after this huge, long recap!!