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So as I've written about before, I'm taking the kids on individual trips this summer. Sam and I are currently on ours and, even though I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon, I'm sure we're having lots of fun! Rachel and I took our trip a few weeks ago and she chose to go to New York City. Today I'm recapping our first day and, be warned, there are a lot of pictures :)

We took a train to Toronto and had to catch it at 5:14am. It was very early, but we were excited none the less. Then we grabbed breakfast at Union Station in Toronto.

We were so excited to finally be on the train to New York City!!! Just thirteen hours left to go... Hahaha!

Some of the views from the train were amazing!

We've never stayed in a hotel in New York before as we always stay with Dave's family who lives north of the city. This time we wanted to be in the heart of things. Our hotel was amazing. The location was a seven minute walk from Penn Station and we walked everywhere. We never took the subway, a taxi, or  used any sort of transportation but our feet.

Rachel was so excited that we were staying in the Fashion District and that we could shop at all the stores we don't have in Canada -- Macy's, Target, etc. As you can probably imagine, I was much less excited about shopping :)

This trip was all about things which Rachel wanted to do, and which Sam and Dave would not want to do! Thus, we went up to the top of the Empire State Building. This was really fun!

I liked how as you made your way to the top, there was a lot of information, including how it has been featured in popular culture (King Kong, Sleepless in Seattle, etc) and the history of how it was built.

Such incredible views! 

This was a little photo backdrop on the 86th floor.

I loved how far you could see. It was such a clear day!

I don't remember taking the picture on the left but clearly we thought we were funny! I'm 100% sure there was a window behind us :) And we got Rachel her own phone before we left on the trip and she loved taking pictures of everything.

We were not the only ones doing gymnastics on the 102nd floor. It was such an amazing backdrop and the pictures of Rachel are some of my favourite of the whole trip. Clearly, some of us are better at gymnastics than others of us! Hahaha!

We left the Empire State Building and made a very important stop at the Lindt store. This is my favourite chocolate ever!

Then we walked up 5th Avenue. We got a street pretzel, stopped at the library for a little bit, and did some window shopping. I was excited to stop at the Sketchers store but this was the only store I was excited about.

For some reason, there was a beautiful flower backdrop at St Patrick's Cathedral so we took the opportunity to get some photos.

Rachel had made a list of things she wanted to do, and places she wanted to visit, on this trip and one of the places was "the Upper East Side." So I found Alice's Tea Cup, a cafe where we could have a really fun teatime in that area. The food was soooo good but there was just a little bit too much food for a tea time, in my opinion. But it was a perfect place to stop for lunch and I'm still dreaming about the Chopped Tea-Egg Salad sandwich. It was delicious!

After we left Alice's Tea Cup, we made a quick stop in Central Park but Rachel commented, "It's not the same without Sam and Daddy" so we didn't stay long. We continued to walk down 5th Avenue and did some back to school shopping for Rachel. She loved it.

We took a quick break at our hotel, and then we walked to Times Square so we could visit the M&M Store, another place on Rachel's list. I loved the button/needle sculpture we passed. And Times Square is so much fun but so overwhelming!

I loved all the colours at the M&M Store and we ended up buying a bunch of the unique colours of M&Ms from this wall.

I loved the Pedestrian Flow Zones they had on some avenues in the city. This allowed for more space to walk and it was so pretty. We grabbed a quick slice of pizza at a local place around the corner from our hotel. We were exhausted and it was so nice to sit and eat delicious pizza (mine was mushroom and black pepper) and watch the city go by.

By the end of our first day, we had walked almost 28,000 steps (20 kilometres/12.5 miles) and we were ready for bed. After all, we had another full day to go!