spring break in new york city

New York, New York!

Once again, the girls’ spring break vacations aligned, and we took advantage of that fact to book another travel adventure for the week. You might remember that last year we headed east to Asheville, NC, and had a blast. Because M takes a lot of day trips now on Southwest, this year we had some serious frequent flier miles burning holes in our pockets, so we ventured a bit further, and decided to take the girls to visit NYC for the first time.

I love the city, and have been there on a wide variety of trips – during my college years on school trips or visits with friends, more recent visits with family – I even applied to Columbia for graduate school, and took a quick trip there with my dad to visit. I’ve braved the crowds on New Year’s Eve in Times Square (fun to do once!), seen a few concerts and plays, traipsed through lots and lots of galleries, and been to the top of every major landmark. (My roommate Nancy even found a picture of us at the top of the WTC in ’94? ’95? Forgive me if I don’t post that photo here!) One of my most vivid memories is spending several hours stuck in the Holland Tunnel in record breaking summer temperatures, missing dinner reservations, and just barely making it to the Astor Place Theater for a 10 pm show. Or sitting in an underground jazz club in Greenwich village with an old boyfriend and his aunt, about five feet from the stage, listening to set after set.

M went there as a child too – he remembers his trip to the observation deck of the WTC, and dining in the restaurant there, Windows on the World (mostly because he and his brother had to put on suit coats from a big closet full of loaner coats to dine there as kids). No suit, no service! We knew the kids were at a great age to visit, so we booked our airline tickets and we were on our way.

But… hotel shopping was sort of a drag. Our visit was positioned between St. Patrick’s Day and Easter weekend, and hotel prices were proving to be fairly costly. And since we were going to be there for almost a week, we knew we needed a little bit of breathing room at the end of the day – so we were looking at hotel suites for our stay. We checked out prices in hotels all over the place – and they were astronomical. Around that time, M’s parents started talking about joining us for a few days of our trip, so when we thought about doubling those nightly costs, we decided to get creative. I searched on Airbnb and VRBO, but I was pretty underwhelmed – I sort of imagined it might feel like we were crashing a college student’s apartment and that wasn’t really the vibe I was going for on this trip.

Then I got lucky, landing on the Kid & Coe website. They had me at the pictures.

I can be bought very easily.

Tiny little photos of poorly lit apartment bedrooms, or professionally shot photos like this?

Hmmm…

So we started looking at options that would accommodate up to six people, and that was somewhere south of $$$$ a night. We landed on a brownstone in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. There were a couple of trade-offs with this property – not exactly the center of the action, one bathroom(!), no doorman – but those were all things we were willing to deal with, especially when it meant our nightly rental fee was at least half the cost of anything else we had found so far.

I emailed the owner – and she immediately wrote back. We corresponded back and forth for several weeks, and by the time I actually booked the house, I felt pretty confident in our choice. It was an adventure – why not?

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I wrote daily posts about our trip to Asheville, and I thought I’d do the same with our NYC trip. Hopefully they don’t drag on and on forever! And since I gathered all our New York books together to read before our trip, I thought I’d pair each day with some of our favorite children’s books – some I’ve featured here before, but lots of new ones as well. So stay tuned!