A last minute trip to NYC [Part 1]

When my parents suggested that we stay the night in NYC on Friday I told them that we didn't need to and we were just planning on taking a train super early on Saturday. Then we would attend the temple and spend the rest of the day together in NYC. Then my mom said they had an anniversary gift for us that would help pay for our hotel. We have a small budget each month to attend the temple and didn't do any anniversary gifts this year. I wouldn't even let Chris buy me flowers. I knew we were going to have the day in NYC so I wanted to be able to get some good food or do something together while we were there. I also figured it would be impossible to find a decent hotel in Manhattan on a Friday night at a rate that was affordable. We were in luck, though! We found a beautiful 4 star hotel in Midtown on Hotwire (we love Hotwire, by the way). Knowing that we could use the money we saved for our food and what was left of the hotel made it so much easier to be spontaneous and go for an overnight trip at the last minute. We made a deal, though, that if we went there to spend the night we wouldn't do anything crazy on Friday night. We would go, see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, get some food, and just hang out in the hotel. Our hotel (Le Parker Meriden) also had an indoor rooftop pool that was open all night. We figured we could just relax and get a good night's sleep before heading to the temple in the morning. So off we went!

We are super lucky that we live 2 minutes away from the Trenton regional rail line. SEPTA takes us to Trenton Transit Center and then we hope on a New Jersey Transit train to Penn Station in NYC. The train rides aren't super luxurious or anything, but it's so much nicer than driving!

We got to our hotel, checked in, and marveled at the view from our room and the giant flatscreen TV inside.

This is the view from our room. It was so surreal to be up on the 32nd floor and be able to see down at the street below!

We relaxed for a bit and then headed to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree.

Much to my dismay, the tree wasn't lit. It was huge, though. It's the biggest Christmas tree I have ever seen. It's amazing to me that it is actually a real Christmas tree. Most of it was blocked off. They were setting up for the big tree lighting.

We took pictures pretty far in front of the tree and it still makes us look teeny tiny.

I was hoping we could see people ice skating, but they were cleaning the ice. It was cool to see the rink, though!

We found a pizza place on the way back to the hotel that had really good ratings on Yelp. Our entire dinner was $10. In NYC?! That's crazy cheap.

It was so nice seeing all of the lights decorating the city. NYC is such a magical place. At least the parts of it that I have seen. I'm sure it has it's gross parts just like every other city.

We got back to our hotel and saw the beautiful Christmas tree.

 We went to our room and got changed to head up to the rooftop pool. It was beautiful - but the water was definitely too cold to swim even though it was inside and supposedly heated. Instead of swimming, Chris and I walked around and took in the beautiful views.

 Realizing that some pizza wasn't enough food, we found out that our hotel was home to a secretly popular burger joint. I went downstairs and asked around. They told me to turn down this dark hallway and I was greeted with this:

 

That's all it was! It was just this little burger light with an arrow. Inside was this really crowded burger joint. They were pretty tasty! I went downstairs to pick them up and then brought it all back to our room. Then we watched Garth Brooks's live performance in Las Vegas. It was such a relaxing, fun night!