No Matter How You Plan

Before vacation I like to plan everything that I would like to see. Fun because it used to drive me crazy when I was a kid and my dad did the same thing. I would think ‘why are we getting up early during vacation just to see….’. Now I am the one waking everyone up so we can be the first ones to see this or that and we can get everything in. Most places you can plan pretty well and the biggest worry is going to be the weather. But even this can be planned for by have alternatives and such. When we went to Vegas it was pretty easy to figure out what to do each day, it was the same with Chicago, and Sandusky (Cedar point). But I do have to admit that New York was a different story.

Even with quite a bit of flexibility built in I’m not sure anyone can actually plan too much in New York. New York just has too much going on and there are too many variables and unknowns. Plus, I was surprised to find out that information was relatively hard to come by for many of the things I wanted to; plus, I just had so many things to keep track of it was hard to take everything into account. That being said we on missed out on four of the activities we wanted to do. One was closed for remodeling and the others we found and where either closed or we could not get in for some reason or another. From day one we started shifting things around and moving activities from day to day. Really with the exception of the three shows that I had tickets lined up for we really only used our plan as a list of things we were going to try and see.

The first afternoon actually worked out well because we were able to see more than we had planned so we thought we were off to a good start. Unfortunately the next morning we slept in a little bit and all of the tickets to the Statue of Liberty were taken, this by 10 in morning (we slept in but not that late). So now we were behind a few items. The same day when we found we could tour the Federal Reserve Bank because you need to make a reservation 5 days in advance so that came off the list. Soon we had to double back not just for the Statue of Liberty but also for the Empire State Building. We also couldn’t get into the Ukrainian museum because it was only open certain days of the week. If was funny we were always one site off from our plan everyday, but we ended up seeing more than we planned because we just happened to be in the area of something.

So guess all I can say about planning a trip in New York is it is good to research on each site (pay attention to when they are open and if you need to get there early) but also you really have to kind of go with the flow and maybe just have some idea of what you want to see and where it is so you can try to do a bunch of stuff on the same day. Other than that no matter how plan I think the city will throw a monkey into the wrench.