New York City, Day 1

2019 Road Trip, Stop #1
New York City, NY
Day 1

I drove into the city at night around 9 PM on a Wednesday from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn, where my cousin lives in Park Slope. There was NO traffic whatsoever. I highly recommend it as a good time to drive in if you want to avoid traffic!

The next afternoon I had set to meet up with my host-sister from Japan who was doing a month long study abroad program at Pace University. We met for lunch right by her school and then took the subway north for the highlight of the day...

The American Museum of Natural History


There was a HUGE line for tickets when we walked through the doors. Apparently there is no set price for tickets, just a "suggested donation". All the signs at the entrances around the lobby say "admission ticket needed past this point", but none of the guards were checking tickets. We were really confused by this.

After a few moments of standing in line, I noticed a sign that said tickets were available for purchase online as well! So I bought the two admissions on my phone and we were able to jump out of the line and walk straight into the museum! Again, no one even checked to see we had purchased them, but at least our conscious was clear!



The museum is HUGE. There are 4 floors and 6 types of exhibitions:

  • Earth and Space Halls
  • Fossil Halls
  • Animal Halls
  • Environment Halls
  • Human and Culture Halls
  • Temporary Exhibitions


Since this was my host-sister's last week in New York, her only day to go to the museum, and just 3-4 hours before it closed for the day, we moved pretty quickly and didn't read a lot in order to see everything. Our favorite parts were the Fossil Halls - seeing the enormous skeletons of dinosaurs and other extinct mammals pieced back together.

Central Park

After the museum closed, my host-sister and I parted ways and since the museum is located right in front of Central Park, I decided to take a short stroll through on my way to a subway station to head back to my cousin's place.


Well with no real destination, a stroll through Central Park will suck you in. Bfore I knew it, I had already walked about a third a length of the park! So to get to a subway station that could take me back to Brooklyn, I just kept walking south until I got all the way to the southern end.


For being the first exploratory day of my trip, I got to see a lot and did a LOT of walking. In total that day, I walked 6.5 miles!

I got back to my cousin's place just in time for the sunset, so we went up to the rooftop and watched it go down over the gorgeous city skyline.


Location: New York, NY, USA

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