Pura Vida - Our Family Blog: NYC - day 4 & 5 - Today Show, Empire State Building, and Central Park

If I ever watch TV in the morning, I'm usually watching the Today Show. I thought it might be fun to see if we could be in the live audience outside the Today Show location on Rockafeller Center. We didn't want to wait in the crowd, so we tried to get on behind Hoda and Lester and we had a very brief appearance in the background. The kids were surprisingly not at all interested in getting on TV, so we soon left to walk to the Empire State Building.

Jonas was up first each morning so he'd eat cereal and find King Kong outside. Don't worry "he's nice"

This morning was a bit colder and the walk to the Empire State Building was pretty long (although much of it was along 5th Avenue). With a few short breaks, we made it there. Luckily, the line was very short (it often grows to be 2 hours) and we were up on the 80th and 86th floor in no time. The 80th floor is indoors with windows on all sides. The 86th floor has an indoor viewing area, but also an open air viewing deck. It was incredibly windy (to the point we almost couldn't open the door to go out) and cold, so we didn't spend much time outside, but we did spend time looking out the windows. The building also has a free app that gives audio descriptions of what you're seeing from each side. It was really cool to see the city from this view.

After our time near the clouds, we took a subway back to the hotel for a nap and lunch in the room. I had discovered that our hotel's pesky resort fee randomly included a free manicure for each guest at a nail salon down the road. After naps, Savannah and I walked there to get our nails done...a rare treat! When we returned, we all decided to head back to Central Park to walk around a bit more.

We saw a lake, an ice skating rink, the tunnel featured on Home Alone 2, and then, per the kid's request, we went back to the playground to play.

We went back to the hotel for dinner and to pack up to go home the next morning.

every night we ate dinner in our room. This was definitely not a culinary trip!

Jonas always has to be "naken on mommy's bed" after a bath

The next morning, we took another Lyft to the airport before flying back to Chicago. We found a nice play area in the airport where we could wait for our flight to board...such a nice feature that the Indy airport also has.