I flew standby with my youngest and oldest to NYC in late November. We got early morning flights, had breakfast at LaGuardia Airport and then caught the shuttle to our hotel. After being able to check in early, we got Lyft to the train station.

(In case you ever go, know that train also means subway in NYC. If you want the actual train, you have to call it the railroad or search for LIRR or NJ Transit. I now know this from experience.)

We took the train just two stops to Grand Central Station. We wanted to see the black rectangle on the ceiling that shows how dirty it was before they cleaned it off from all the cigarette and cigar smoke. I’m so glad they did because you really wouldn’t be able to see the incredible ceiling design if they hadn’t. We got lunch at the dining concourse. 

We then went to the New York City Library. The street we walked along had metal book quotes embedded in the sidewalk along the way. We took pictures by the lions and then headed in to get signed up for a tour. While we had planned to sign up for the overall library tour, they also offered a tour of the reading room, so we signed up for that one instead. After signing up, we had 30 minutes until the tour, so we went into one of their exhibit rooms and saw the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals, a Gutenberg Bible and Charles Dickens’ writing desk. The tour told us some of the history of the library (built on an old reservoir) and then took us into the reading room where people can use the library’s books from seven floors below ground to research. 

After the library, we headed to Macy’s. We hadn’t been inside on any of our previous trips. There were signs of them getting ready for the Thanksgiving Day Parade and it was all decorated for Christmas. We went inside and found their Christmas market and did some window shopping. Then, we went up the escalators until we found the old, original wooden escalators to ride. They’re from the 1920s.

We were fairly close to Times Square so we headed there for dinner and had food at Gordon Ramsey’s Fish and Chips. It was starting to rain pretty hard, so on our way back to Grand Central Station, we stopped in a NYC souvenir shop so I could get a keychain for my travel backpack. Once, we got to Grand Central, we waited for our train, rode it and got back to the hotel for a good night’s sleep.

We woke up early the next morning to get breakfast and catch the train that would let us get to the Rockefeller Ice Rink by 9:20 a.m. for our skating time. This was the main point of the entire trip since my youngest had fallen and hurt her arm when we had gone last winter. She had just gotten on the ice when she fell so she didn’t get to skate – and she’s our ice skater! Rockefeller wasn’t very crowded so she got on the ice carefully with my other daughter and they had fun skating. No falling this time! We did bring her own ice skates (just gate checked them at the airport). The tree was still behind scaffolding, so that was the only disappointed part. 

Then, we walked to Central Park to skate at Wollman Rink. This ended up being her favorite place to ice skate that day. The scenery was beautiful and while the rink was decently crowded, there was plenty of room for everyone to skate. My oldest also skated with her there. 

Our next stop was the Trump Tower to have lunch at the Trump Café. It wasn’t opened the last time we were there. The pizza was good, but the paninis were great! It was crowded with a long line to take a picture by the 45 logo. We saw lots of cops and secret service around the place.

We had plenty of time in the afternoon, so we decided to do a quick visit to MoMA so my youngest could see some of the key paintings there. We saw Starry Night, Monet’s Water Lilies, Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait and Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup paintings.

Our next stop was Bryant Park to check out their Winter Village and to do our third and final ice skating stop of the day. We looked around the village (it was very crowded on a Saturday afternoon!) and then still had another hour to kill before we had our ice skating slot. We decided we had time to walk to Times Square and visit the Hershey’s store. We snagged a few treats and then headed back to Bryant Park. Only my youngest could skate so the oldest went to scout out some gnocchi for a snack. Bryant Park is set on top of the NY Public Library’s underground storage, so she was skating on top of a library!

We then went to Saturday evening mass at St. Patrick’s after looking around the church. There’s a St. Patrick relic there. After mass, we found dinner at the shopping area under Rockefeller Center. When we came back up to the streets afterwards, we ran into three Radio City Rockettes and were able to get pictures with them.

We had another great night’s sleep at our hotel and got up early to catch our standby flights back home. We all got upgraded to business class, so that was an added bonus to the experience.