Day #7 – Liberty Island, NYSE, Brooklyn Bridge & Empire State Building

Today was going to be special because I get to do 3 things that I have never done – visit Liberty Island, walk the Brooklyn Bridge and go to the top of Empire State Building. Talk about waiting 20 years to check 3 bucket list items. That is 5 trips to NYC and every time thinking – next time. I think we clicked more pictures today than in our whole trip.

The ferry to Liberty Island was crowded and it seemed like people in NYC had given up on masks – very few people were wearing masks. Nevertheless, both the ferry and the pedestal offered great views of the City. My personal favorite was the museum and the climb inside the pedestal. We got to learn so many things about the statue, design, logistical issues and politics behind it.

Next stop was walk to New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). on the way we took a short detour to The Charging Bull followed by The Fearless Girl in front of NYSE.

After some NY style street hot dogs and running into a bread shop at Farmer’s Market we took the train to the other side – High St in Brooklyn, with the aim of walking the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. Initially kids were reluctant to walk the 1.4 mile distance from High Street station to City Hall station. But as we started walking, adrenaline, the views and conversation took over. Pretty soon we had crossed the whole bridge without flinching.

My favorite part – kids copying Shah Rukh Khan pose on top of the bridge. Now I can say with full confidence that my kids are totally “filmy”. While kid #1 tried to do a perfect copy of SRK, kid #2 ended up doing a comic version that looked more like a scarecrow than SRK.

Next stop from Brooklyn Bridge – go look for Jonah & run into Annie at The Empire State Building (watch Sleepless in Seattle for reference). The building was everything you would expect from an iconic building. They walked us through 2-3 levels of museum exhibits – tons of stories and references, King Kong memorabilia, construction stories, recreated black and white film rolls from 1930s, etc.

A tip – the evening tours are tad bit more expensive. So I booked us for the last afternoon tour at 6:30 pm. The sun was still out, but the dusk views were still amazing. Every bit worth the wait.

As we were taking pictures and soaking in the view, I was having a parallel conversation with my friend and trying to coordinate our pick up. We were scheduled to have dinner with my friend from B-school and her husband. Somehow we managed to do it seamlessly – we walked out of the building and their car pulled up. Talk about perfection.

Next step was utter chaos though – 🤪. Since we weren’t sure what to do for dinner, we didn’t make any reservations. Turns out every place we went to had a 30-50 mins wait. So we went from door to door. Finally we came upon a place that had ZERO wait. Someone said do we want to eat this food? My response – we dont have a choice, lets just eat what they have. And boy, did it turn out to be one of the best meals!!! We ended up at Hill Country Barbecue Market on W 26th St.

Instead of ordering individual meals we decided to order a Combo meal for 4-6 people. The platter included a little bit of everything with 3 sides. We all ended up loving one meat and we concluded – “this is the best”. Afterwards we had gelato and said bye to our friends and headed home. During the day we had taken 200+ pictures and walked just over 20,000 steps in ~12 hrs.