The Thanksgiving holidays is supposed to be about
spending time with family and friends, eating a ton and watching the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade on television from the comfort and warmth of your own
home…right?
Wrong! We
celebrated our first Thanksgiving in New York by dragging my parents to the
city to watch the parade in person. Our
Priceline hotel put us in Long Island City and just a short subway ride to
Central Park. We arrived in NYC Wednesday
afternoon and hit the town running! Our
trip this time included a stop at Gray’s Papaya at 72nd and
Broadway. Brett had been dying to eat
there and my parents loved the scene in Fools
Rush In when Selma Hayek’s character had the famous hotdogs shipped in for
Matthew Perry.
After stuffing ourselves silly, we headed down to the
American Museum of Natural History where they were blowing up the balloons for
the parade. The preview of the parade
went from 3:00-10:00 p.m. and it looked as though most of New York had shown up
to check it out. We got in line with all
the other sightseers and started snapping away.
I know that the parade is geared towards family and
children. And I certainly remember how
excited I was watching it on television as a child. I can’t imagine how pumped up I would have
been as a kid getting to be there (after all, I was leading this whole expedition). But, as a childless adult, I also still have
the ability to call “crazy” when I see it.
Parents, but really more so the kids, were just acting the fool at this
event! The children were running around like they had just eaten crack-pops and strollers turned into battering
rams. (I’m pretty sure Brett only had 9
toes intact by the time we got home)
Things were going fine until some delinquent, hyped up six-year-old (looking) child with a parent not paying attention knocked down my 59-year-old father. As in laid him out flat! My dad ended up with a bloody nose, cut chin
and hands and bruised knees.
As I scraped him up off the concrete sidewalk before
another tank stroller ran over him, I thought briefly, “Maybe we should have
just watched this on tv at home?” Nah…he’s
a trooper!
Ok, so I noticed the next morning my dad walked with a
slight limp, but it sure didn’t slow him down. I know exactly where I get the urge to take so many pictures from!
Figuring out the holiday subway schedule was
a little tricky and we ended up watching the parade from 64th street
and Central Park West in between buildings that protected us from the wind. While we couldn’t see much of the marching bands
going by, we had a great view of the balloons!
The parade was amazing to see in person and was well worth the effort (and bruises) it took to get there. We (me & my dad) couldn’t stop taking pictures! We loved it when one of the celebrities came down the street. OK, some we didn’t know, but we were in luck. Two cute little teeny bopper girls perched on a ladder had the best seats in the house and you would have thought Brad Pitt himself walked right up and pinched their hineys the way they were screaming.
It took me a minute to find Kanye West on his float. For some reason I thought he was the person on top of the apple, so I was busy taking pictures of that.
Jessica Simpson’s float stopped right in front of us for what seemed like a full minute! I wanted to yell, “You’re hair just looks wonderful, honey!” so that way she would feel good about how great her hair looked and maybe that would soften the blow she realized that jacket was not a good choice.
In true Christmas Story style, we headed over to Chinatown for Thanksgiving Day lunch. Why have dressing when you can have dumplings? There were plenty of tourists that had the same idea we did. It really felt like the holidays when it started snowing briefly! Again, we hit Joe’s Shanghai on Pell Street and again, we weren’t disappointed! If you ever get to go, you have to try the steamed dumplings…so good!
I had read online that taking a trip on the Staten Island
Ferry was a good way to see the Statue of Liberty if you couldn’t make the
tour. Since the tours were closed for
the holiday, we figured this would work just fine. The ride lasted about 30 minutes and we got some
great shots as we floated by. We did have to hop off when we got to Staten Island and re-board.
It was my dad’s first trip to NYC and he wanted to see
Ground Zero at the World Trade Center site.
While I think it’s important to pay your respects to those who lost
their lives there, it never gets any easier visiting the area and remembering
that September day. We have a family
friend from Arkansas that made it out of the first building just 10 minutes
before it collapsed.
Exhausted, wet and smelling a lot like Chinatown, we
decided to load up and head home…except that we had another little side
trip planned. Why wait for Black Friday
sales when you can hit them on Thursday? We stopped off at the Woodbury Commons Premium
Outlets where stores were opening at 9:00 p.m.!
Running on adrenaline, our shopping adventure saw “one in, one out” store lines guarded by security, sales that would have made your heart skip a beat and more money spent than Santa himself could charge. No really, the guy in line in front of me at Spyder dropped about $3,000 in ten minutes!
The whole scene was simply just glorious!
We didn’t end up leaving until around 1:00 a.m. and by the time we made
it back to the Capital Region and were in bed, it was nearly 4:00 a.m.! Hardcore enough for ‘ya?
Our first Thanksgiving went by in a New York minute, even
if it was more like 22 hours!
Happy Thanksgiving Y’all!
