New York Day 3

Wednesday in New York was 9/11, before the trip, when I was trying to get everything into our agenda, we had planned to go to Ground Zero. When I called to get the reservations they said it was only open to family that day, which made sense, but put a kink in our schedule.

I then moved Coney Island to Wednesday and I thought everything was fine and dandy. Then the night before we left I had the feeling that I should look on Coney Island's website again. It was a good thing I did because Coney Island is seasonal and after Labor Day it closes down and is only open in the weekends. I almost had a heart attack since a lot of our schedule was set in stone with deposits and reservations. After I pulled myself together I realized that Sunday we did have something planned, but I didn't have to reserve it and could move it to any day so it went to Wednesday.

Our activities didn't start until noon so we decided to go out to breakfast. We ate at a little joint called Popover Cafe and it was delicious. John ordered a popover because you have to have one for the name sake, it was so large we all shared it. He also got the flopover while Mary and I had the coconut-almond crusted challah french toast. It was a yummy little place and if eating out didn't cost so much we would have went there again.

After breakfast we walked to a pier on the west side of Manhattan and took a 3 hour, full island boat cruise (NYP).
It was such a hot, muggy, hazy day so the pictures didn't turn out great, but here were some of the sights.

 This is one of the new world trade towers, #1, they'll be rebuilding all 7 buildings that were destroyed.

 Ellis Island, it was still closed because of damage from Hurricane Sandy so we didn't get to go there.
 

 Brooklyn bridge, we went over it twice in the subway when we went to Coney Island. That's coming too!

Truthfully, the 3 hour cruise is just too long or maybe we felt that way because it was so hot and muggy. If I had to do it again, I'd just do the semi island tour since most of the sites are at the bottom of Manhattan.

We were going to do the Empire State Building (NYP), but because of the haze we decided to do that another day and wait for a clearing. Instead we did Madume Tussauds Wax Museum (NYP). John and I had been to the one in Vegas and this one is twice the size.

After the wax museum we wandered around Time Square and did a little shopping.

We then decided to take up our food guide's advice and went to one of the restaurants he suggested. It was an Italian place and it was divine.   Via della Pace is located in lower Manhattan, I won't lie and say I wasn't a little leery walking from the subway to the restaurant. It was dark and a little scary, but maybe I was the only one out of us three that felt nervous. It's was harder to navigate the streets down lower because then they started having street names, not just numbers and the places you're looking for don't usually have large, lighted signs. When we finally stumbled upon the place I breathed a large sigh of relief.

John had the Rigatoni del Pirata, I had the Gnocchi alla Gorgonzola and Mary had the Lasagna Via Della Pace. She even took a picture! We really all should have because that's what you do when you eat at nice places.

It was the best Italian I've ever had and it was in a very tiny place. So very cute! Maybe 50 people could cozily fit in to eat and I'm probably being generous with my guess. We didn't even get there until about 9PM and a live blues band started around 10PM so we stayed to hang out. I could really get use to the night life in NYC since everything stays open so super late!

After some heavy carbs we decided to head to another food guide suggestion. 1AM around this point, like a I said, love the night life! We got some sweet tooth satisfying gelato at a delicious place called Gelato Ti Amo. The original shop is actually in Italy and they had barely opened the shop we went to in April! How cool is that??!!

While we walked back to the subway we could see what the New Yorkers did for remembrance of 9/11. Very humbling I'd say.

 Since it was already an ungodly hour and our bellies were full of noodles and gelato we decided to pay our respects. It was nice to actually be at the site since I thought we wouldn't have been able to.

There was only a hand full of people in the same place as us, it was so remarkable since the rest of New York was always packed with people! It really was a great end to a great day!