Things to do in New York – CITYPASS

Empire State Building

The American Museum of Natural History

The next day we had booked The Natural History Museum for 10:30am. NYC is 5 hours behind U.K. time, so we were waking up really early for the first few days. The Natural History Museum is right by Central Park. We decided to walk there from our hotel and see some of the park on the way. It was a 50 minute walk from our hotel but we didn’t mind as we were still enjoying mooching around and experiencing every bit of the city. We had tons of time given we left the hotel at 07:30!

If you choose to take the subway, you will need to get off at 81st street. The main museum entrance had a huge queue, luckily someone told us to walk around and try the entrance on 81st street, the queue there was a lot shorter and we got straight in. There are four floors of exhibits and you could honestly stay there all day if you didn’t have an impatient toddler with you. Leo was excited to see the animal exhibits, he loved the dinosaurs, he sort of enjoyed the space show, but after that he enjoyed running off into crowds and giving us a few scares! A slightly older child would absolutely love it.

We had lunch in the canteen which is on the bottom floor, super expensive but a fair amount of choice. We had three slices of pepperoni pizza, a plate of salad to share, one plate of meat with rice and three cans of pop. Leo had a banana and some Mac and Cheese … I almost died there and then when she said “That will be $80 please!”. Definitely aim to have your lunch before or after your visit! After lunch my mum took Leo for a walk in his pram to try to get him to nap, whilst we spent an hour properly checking out the exhibits. Once we had finished in the Museum we went across to Central Park and briefly checked out the south western part. We found a couple of play grounds and let Leo live his best life while we sat on a bench with a coffee.

On our third day we had Top of the Rock booked for 14:00 (the sun set was due around 16:00 but the sky starts to get pretty during the golden hour before). Again we woke up extremely early and had no plans until our 14:00 slot, so we decided to get a subway to Brooklyn and walk back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge. This cost us £2 each on the subway and was one of the highlights of the trip. Highly recommend. Once in Manhattan we walked towards Wall Street, saw the famous charging bull statue (people were actually queueing to take pictures with its balls) and then headed towards Battery park to see the Statue of Liberty. When I saw “Statue of Liberty view point” on google maps I had high expectations. The park is lovely, there’s a nice water side walk – but the statue is so far away you can barely tell what it is! We got great views a few days later on our Circle Line landmarks cruise, skip this view point unless you just happen to be in the neighbourhood!

9/11 Memorial Museum

Circle Line Cruise

The Metropolitan Art Museum

Having the CityPass meant we had the reassurance that we would (at the very least) see five amazing attractions. It was great to have a bit of structure to the trip, while still having the flexibility to change things around if Leo wasn’t in the mood for exploring. Knowing once we paid for the passes we wouldn’t have to spend any more money on attractions made budgeting for the trip easier too. I would highly recommend looking into different tourist passes when visiting New York City.