Preparing for Gotham

  Back in December I spent a week in the city that never sleeps, also known as NYC.  I can see why this city never sleeps....there's just too much darn noise.  There's noise, activity, and adventure and I made sure to plan well before the trip to take in as much as I could.  I have decided to split up my NYC trip into multiple blog posts so that I can put more focus on different aspects and highlights of the trip.
  I would like to start my trip review by mentioning a little about what I did to plan for NYC.  For those travelers interested in museums, I would highly recommend "googling" or doing an internet search of free days and free hours for NYC museums.  There are a few museums that are always free or are free with suggested donations.  However for the museums that are charging quite a bit to get in, free days are definitely worth while in this expensive city.  Sometimes travelers only have a couple hours to spend in a museum and balk at an $18 entrance fee.  Visiting during free hours definitely gives the pocketbook a rest. 
  During previous visits, we visited a couple of the "biggie" museums:  the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  This trip I found that the J.P. Morgan Library Museum had free hours on Fridays nights and the Frick Collection had free hours on Sundays.  I had also wanted to go to the Rubin Museum of Art, which has free hours on Friday nights as well, but decided to save that for a future visit.
  Since we were staying in NYC for a week, I decided to group activities and sights into the different areas of NYC and try to do a different area on each day.  I didn't want to have every single minute of our trip planned so I left plenty of free time too.  We had a few schedule changes and didn't get to see every thing we had planned on seeing but overall we had quite a wonderful and entertaining trip.  To help cut other costs, I would recommend using a few Groupons or Living Social Deals.  I bought 3 deals in advance of our trip and we were pleased with all 3 deals.  (All 3 deals were for food and beverages.)  I did not want to buy too many deals and then have to spend time running around the city making sure to use them all. 
  Since we went in December, holiday decorations were everywhere and made the city extra enjoyable.  Beware, it's hard to tell from the photos but Rockefeller Plaza was packed with people vying for the perfect Christmas tree photo.

 

  In my next posts, I want to share our NYC adventures and we'll see if I was able to take a bite out of the Big Apple or if I was the one that was chewed up and spit out.