{"id":7,"date":"2011-07-17T04:18:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-17T04:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/?p=7"},"modified":"2013-11-17T03:28:21","modified_gmt":"2013-11-17T03:28:21","slug":"nyc-day-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/?p=7","title":{"rendered":"NYC – Day 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Empire State Building, World Trade Center, Battery Park, Top of the Rock… what a day!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

We took the subway to the Empire State Building this morning and used our CityPass tickets to go to the observation deck.\u00a0 (The tour guide on our bus said the extra $15 for the higher observation deck wasn’t worth it.)\u00a0 The CityPass ticket includes the audio tour, which is nice.\u00a0 You bypass the first<\/i> line when you get to the building, but there are more than enough additional lines to make up for it.<\/p>\n

At the top, it was pretty crowded, but good views.\u00a0 It was a hazy day, however.<\/p>\n

After the Empire State Building, we took the tour bus to the World Trade Center.\u00a0 The new World Trade Center building is about 2\/3 done.\u00a0 We got totally snookered by a hot dog vendor who charged us $23 for the same lunch that cost us between $6 and $8 down at Times Square.\u00a0 Oh well.\u00a0 From WTC, we walked to Battery Park, saw the bull statue near Wall Street.\u00a0 We navigated over to Canal Street where Diana did some inspired, nerves-of-steel haggling, and got a nice leather purse and sunglasses.<\/p>\n

We went back to our hotel before heading out for our final NYC adventure.\u00a0 We walked to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, then to Grand Central Station (wow!), and back to Rockefeller Center to visit the “Top of the Rock” observatory.<\/p>\n

Top of the Rock is better run than Empire.\u00a0 Instead of standing in all these crazy lines, you get your ticket for a specific time.\u00a0 Then come back at your ticketed time.\u00a0 The result — fewer lines.\u00a0 The view is great.\u00a0 Instead of railing and fences like Empire, there is thick Plexiglass around the observation deck (with slits where you can stick your camera to escape the glare).\u00a0 Then you can head up to the second<\/i> observation deck for a similar view, and finally you can go to the third<\/i> observation deck which is smaller, but has now surrounding Plexiglass.<\/p>\n

And as they say, the view from Top of the Rock has something Empire’s view will never have: a view of the Empire State Building.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Empire State Building, World Trade Center, Battery Park, Top of the Rock… what a day! We took the subway to the Empire State Building this morning and used our CityPass tickets to go to the observation deck.\u00a0 (The tour guide on our bus said the extra $15 for the higher observation deck wasn’t worth it.)\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/specksweb.com\/sandpapershoes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}