We started our day with breakfast in our room, then walked down to the NBC Experience Store to try to book a Studio tour. They were booked out until the afternoon so we bought tickets for 2pm and then caught the subway to the American Museum of Natural History. We got there before it opened at 10am, so had a look around and grabbed some pretzels from a street cart for our morning tea. We came out of the subway at this entrance and I was confused because it didn't look anything like it does in Night at the Museum.
So we walked around the corner to see this
and knew we were in the right place! We were a little disappointed that T-Rex wasn't in the foyer like in the movie, this guy looked a little sad in comparison
We spent a couple of hours looking around at the different exhibits and having fun trying to spot stuff from the movie.
We came out onto West 81st St which is supposed to be where Jerry lives in Seinfeld, so we walked down to find #129
which of course looks nothing like his apartment but that's the address that they used in the show.
We caught the subway back to Times Square and went back to Ellen's Stardust Diner for lunch. We were seated straight away but it was really busy and we waited 20 minutes without having a waiter come anywhere near us. It was already after 1pm and we had to be back at NBC for our tour at 2pm so we decided to leave and try elsewhere. I was keen to eat at Appleby's but there was a wait there as well, so we walked down to 6th Ave, grabbed McDonalds takeaway and sat in Rockefeller Centre to eat and people watch.
The NBC tour was fun. We weren't allowed cameras so I don't have any photos, but we started out watching a film about NBC over the years, then we went up to the studios and saw The Dr Oz Show set and the Saturday Night Live set. It wasn't that interesting for the kids as they don't know either show, but they got to see how a tv show is made and the guide was entertaining.
We stopped at Magnolia Bakery on our way back to the hotel and bought some cupcakes for afternoon tea. After a rest, we hopped on the subway to Brooklyn in search of Grimaldi's Pizza. When we got off the train we didn't know where to go, but we saw other groups of tourists walking down a street so we followed them. That turned out to be the right move as they were all headed to Grimaldi's! We arrived around 5.45pm and were told to wait outside. We were second in line but were seated quickly, I think we only waited about 10 minutes.
The staff were stereotypical New Yorkers - rushed and rude! Sam doesn't eat pizza so I enquired if there were other options, such as pasta or garlic bread and was abruptly told NO while having the menu thrown at me! Alex went out to try to get him a pretzel or bag of chips or something but no go, there wasn't anything else in the area. So he went hungry but the rest of us didn't. The pizza was so good! When we left the line was way down the street and around the corner, so I was really glad that we arrived early!
We walked down to the water and got icecream from the Brooklyn Bridge Ice Cream Factory
then found the bridge entrance and started our walk back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge
It wasn't a very long walk and the people-watching and siteseeing was spectacular. When we got to the other side, we headed to the closest subway station and caught the train to 34th St. Seeming as we did Top of the Rock during the day, we wanted to go up the Empire State Building at night. The lines were long but we got through and up to the top pretty quickly. The crowds at the top were huge though and it was near impossible to get a spot near the front and see anything. We all liked the audio tour though.
We were all pretty tired by then, so we hopped back on the subway to 51st St and walked back to the hotel from there.
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