Manhattan and the island

On our second day in the city we had to wake up super duper early in order to go to the Manhattan LDS temple.

We attended the 7:45am session since the later one was a Spanish session and we got to be the witness couple. The Manhattan temple was lovely, quite small and amazing how the sound barrier works and you can't hear any of the honking in the busy intersection the temple is at.

However, we were dead tired. Our intention was to stop at the hotel and change and go off to explore. But we crashed for way too long. The combination of the flipping to a day schedule, only sleeping for 2 hours before our flight, and waking up at 5:30am to go to the temple proved too much for us. So we took a 3 hour nap. I know.. who goes to NYC and naps!? Apparently we do.

After our nap we headed to Soho and Little Italy.

We put our names down with Lombardi's list and walked around a little bit.

Lombardi's was delicious. We were trying to decide which we liked better between Lombardi's and Grimaldi's but we couldn't. They're both so good. 

After we were happy and fed we did some shopping in Soho, looked around some art galleries, went to the cast iron district, and just had fun seeing the buildings in Soho, Noho, Lolita.

After walking around I was ready for a little treat and was excited to get yummy crepes at La Crepe!

Strawberries and nutella. So good. So much better than the Dallas one.

We were supposed to walk around Little Italy and Chinatown, but ran out of time due to our little nap. We had to run over to my fancy surprise number two.

Tyler took me to the Lion King!

We had first row, front mezzanine seats.

The show was beautifully done. The masks and puppets are amazing and make it different and interesting. The story was the same as the movie which was nice since the other broadway Disney shows we'd seen things were changed. We did like Mary Poppins better.

After the show we decided to walk around Times Square a bit

We grabbed a little snack before heading to the hotel.

he took me to my favorite place in the world

Tyler had been planning a surprise for my 25th birthday for a long time. All I knew was to ask for some time off of work. He told me where we were going a few days before so I could plan laundry and packing due to my work schedule. He took me to New York City! 

 

 We packed the night before after Disney on Ice. We had a very early flight and ended up sleeping for only 2 hours.

 

We arrived in LaGuardia around noon and stood in line for almost 30 minutes to get a cab. :-)

We headed to our hotel and dropped off our bags because it was too early to check in. Our hotel was a block from Grand Central Station so off we went to explore.

 

 

 

 We walked around a bit and got our subway cards.

 

 I was starving so we decided to eat something quick at the dining station.

We ate quick sammies at Zaro's Bakery.

 

 

Then we took the subway over to Times Square and walked around to Ripley's Believe it or not! to get our explorer passes.

 

 Tyler on his phone trying to figure out where we needed to go.

 

After getting our passes we headed over to I don't know where (I just followed Tyler) to get our tour set up for Sunday. But we had pretty scenery.

 

 

 

We then walked over through Grand Central Market to get to our hotel.

We stayed at the Fitzpatrick Grand Central Hotel and it was fabulous! Our last experience with NY hotels was sad so I was anxious to see what Tyler had set up and I couldn't have been happier.

Once we got dressed and ready for my first fancy surprise we headed to dinner. We went to a Mediterranean restaurant called Ilili.

We had Kibbeh for appetizers. Such a good memory of my Syrian heritage. It was so close to my grandma's homemade Syrian food.

My first fancy surprise was Mary Poppins!

The show is fabulous. If you ever get a chance to see it on tour or on broadway go! We had amazing 7th row seats and it's was better than I expected.

We then headed to the hotel for some much needed rest.