The idea came to us a couple months ago – could we fly to NYC in the morning, spend a few hours in the city and fly home the same evening? Spring break gave us a chance to try it.

We had to fly out of Columbus and to La Guardia very early in the morning. We got to the airport in NYC, took a Lyft to the closest train station and were in Manhattan within an hour of landing. (It felt really weird to not have any luggage!)

Our first stop was Bluestone Lane for breakfast. We had been to one before and knew we would get a delicious meal. My daughter ordered their special drink and got a free sample of hair perfume with it.

We then walked to find Dinosaur, the Pigeon. It’s a giant pigeon statue. It was quite fun to see something we had seen pictures of on social media in real life. It’s on the high line, so we then walked along that to Chelsea Market. (The high line is the old railway system turned into a walkway.) It was a cloudy day, but we found some cool places to take pictures on our walk and I found a cherry blossom tree starting to bloom!

Chelsea Market has some really neat stores and if we had been hungry, it would have been a great place to eat. We then headed over to Little Island where the Ghost Gate is. It’s the archway left from the Cunard-White Star building where survivors of the Titanic landed when they came to NYC. We walked around Little Island and then got lunch at Pier 57. It was too cold to eat outside this time.

Then we did something on my bucket list – visited Kolkata Chai. I’ve been wanting to try their chai for more than a year and it was so good. I would visit them every time I’m back in NYC. We walked while we drank our chai and found a church. We stopped in and discovered it had more than 100 relics inside! We were in awe! We then to a Lyft to Rockefeller Center for a visit to St. Patrick’s and Trump Tower.

We then walked to The Met and looked around for an hour. We wanted to Lyft back to Grand Central, but traffic was getting too heavy. We got our steps in that afternoon! We grabbed pizza along our way for dinner. 

We made sure to see the view in the Main Terminal and then caught a train back to the station close to La Guardia. We got a Lyft to the airport and made our flight back to Ohio! We were gone from home 19 hours and had 9 hours in Manhattan!