New York, New York

Here we are in New York - the Big Apple.
It is certainly BIG...we walked for HOURS today and barely even scratched the surface. Tomorrow we ride the subway to see different parts of the city!

Yesterday was a big travel day. Out of the hotel by 830am but then our flight was delayed until 1230pm so there was a fair amount of hanging around the airport. Our 'car service' picked us up from New York airport and we arrived our or apartment - a HUGE manhattan brownstone on the upper west side - 2 blocks from Central Park and 2 blocks from Broadway.

On 'our' street lives the actor Alec Baldwin and the singer Tony Bennett and apparently a few other celebrities are close by as well.

We managed to hold off the kids from exploring too much yesterday but this morning it was straight to Central Park. I was amazed at how huge it is (we saw it from the plane as we flew into New York) and how many playgrounds there are - and we barely saw 10% of it.

We wandered down through Central Park until we reached the Museum of Natural History which we visited - but not before our first New York hot dog and pretzel experience!! The kids loved the hot dogs but weren't so fussed about the pretzel - they were just impressed by the size!

The Museum of Natural History was enormous! It would take days to see everything - but we gave it a good go and saw quite a lot of it in the few hours we were there. It was also nice to get out of the heat (32 degrees today).

The afternoon was spent resting and then wandering around the local neighbourhood. Its mostly a very quiet residential area which is nice - lots of kids around.  We have found a gelato-type stand run by a pair of old ladies and Neve is in the process of trying each flavour.

Tomorrow we hit the subway and make our way 'downtown' for more exploring. We have learnt that most playgrounds have some sort of water-feature that the kids can play in to cool down - so will remember to pack the girls swimmers.