If you follow me on Instagram, you'd probably know that Stephen and I spontaneously decided to take a trip to New York City to celebrate our 2nd anniversary. Well, it was as spontaneous as I could allow it. We found the cheap flights a week before the departure date and basically planned our trip as much as we could in that week's time. We went for 5 nights and it was just enough time to get a taste of everything we wanted to see and do. I was going to make this one post, but it turned out the planning portion was kind of long. I did want to include it though, since it might save some people some money!
Flight #
The reason we decided to go through with it in the first place was because we found 2 round trip tickets with United Airlines from DFW to NYC for $286 using Google Flights, which was a total steal. I scoured Priceline, CheapOAir, Expedia, and almost every travel site you could think of and ultimately found Google Flights was the easiest to use and still showed the cheapest prices, without being too in-your-face with all the graphics.
Accommodations #
AirBnB was the obvious choice for us. Stephen and I stayed at an AirBnB last year when we took a trip down to Austin for SXSW, and I used AirBnB to find housing accommodations for my 2-month-long summer internship this past summer, so we've had nothing but great experiences with it. This time was no exception! We found a great listing in Washington Heights, a predominatly Dominican neighborhood in northern Manhattan for about $50 a night. The building was older, but the actual apartment was completely updated, had all new fixtures/appliances, and I liked how it was decorated. It was a bit further out from most of the things we wanted to do, but it was a pretty short walk to both the A and 1 trains, which only took about 20-30 minutes to get downtown. Interestingly, our host was out of town the entire time we were at his apartment, but his friend took care of everything, so it was no big deal. It was clean, safe, and an overall great experience staying there. Here is my invite link for AirBnB. If you use it and book a trip, you can get a $20 credit (I'll get one too :P).
Planning #
Now usually when we do things together, I do a lot of the initial planning and Stephen just goes over it and gives me the yes or no. This was no different. I did a lot of research on Reddit; there are great subreddits (/r/nyc or /r/AskNYC) full of tourist information, good food places, and cool spots to check out. I made a post on /r/AskNYC mentioning some of the things we're interested in and received a lot of great recommendations on places to check out. For the main trip planning though, I used Google's My Maps, which lets you create custom maps. It's great because you can add all the locations you want to check out, plan a route, create different layers, add unique icons for locations, and more. You can also view the map from the mobile app for Google Maps, so you can easily use it to navigate to where you want to go! Here is the specific map I made for this trip; unfortuantely, we took off a lot of the places at the end of each do just so it was easier for us to look for places we wanted to go in the following day, so there's not as much of it left. I will try to include all the places we went in my next post though. :)
Transportation #
Stephen says this was the highlight of the trip. Figuring out the public transit system is daunting, especially if you're a first-time visitor. During our entire trip, we only took a cab ride twice, to get to and from the airport (we didn't want to bother with public transit with luggage). We did take an Uber once because we were tired of walking and it was cold. But other than that, we used either the train or bus. The biggest suggestion I can give if you want to save money is to buy a 7-day Metro Card and use the public transit! It costs $31 for the 7-day pass and you can unlimited swipes, aside from an 18 minute grace period between swipes, not including transfers. As long as you know where you're going, it's a total lifesaver. Even if you get on the wrong train, you can always just take it back to where you were. Luckily for us, we never got on the wrong train, thanks to Stephen's navigation and meticulous use of this app called Transit, which tells you exactly what trains or buses to take to get to your destination. It even tells you when the next train/bus is supposed to arrive. I believe Google Maps does the same thing (we used it a few times, but Stephen preferred Transit). The only thing you have to be careful of is outages and changes during weekends due to maintenance, which they usually tell you about on signs in the stations. At night, the train we took back to our AirBnb became an express train, which means it made less stops in between. That meant we got home faster at night. Taking the train is actually a lot of fun since I enjoy people watching. :P
Stay tuned for Part 2, aka the actual trip!