Christmas in February

Jesse surprised me with a trip to New York for Christmas- what a gift!!! He planned for us to go in February, so for the last 2 months I've been looking forward to this trip. We took a red eye last Monday night, and arrived in NY at 6am (3am our time- whew!) I had another surprise as we were boarding the plane, Jesse informed me that we were flying first class!!! I've never been so fortunate :) And these tickets were FREE because we've saved our earned miles up. Once we arrived we checked our bags at the hotel and hit the streets. We walked all over seeing the Empire State Building, the Library, Times Square, Madison Square Garden, and so on until we hit Battery Park and saw...

The Statue of Liberty! I'd never seen it surrounded by floating ice in the water. It was a beautiful clear day, just very cold.

Then we walked over to Ground Zero, and Trinity Church where there is a 9/11 memorial. These grave stones have been at the church since the 1800's. In the background you can see the rebuilding of the Twin Towers.

After all that walking, we ate a slice of NY pizza, and headed to check in at our hotel. Here's the view from our room on the 49th floor!!! (that's 7th Ave below)

That evening we went to Solute for dinner- amazing Italian food.

Isn't Jesse's coat amazing??!! It was my dad's when he lived in NY and was Jesse's age. Pretty cool!

Then we walked to Starbucks on our way to...

Lion King!!!! What a breath-taking show. The music and costumes were so creative.

Even though we were exhausted, we couldn't just head back to the hotel after the show, so we walked around some more. Here is Rockefeller Center.

Here is the view from our room the next morning...it had snowed all night long! It continued to dump the rest of the day. They were calling it "The Blizzard of 2010"!

We ventured out to Central Park. My personal favorite place we visited!

It was a winter wonderland!

Jesse took an artsy picture of me crossing a bridge.

Lots of sledding in the park.

We were thankful for our water proof Merrel shoes.

Then we headed back into the city to see if we could win the Wicked lottery....and we did!!

So we grabbed pizza again for lunch, quickly changed, and ran back to the theatre.

We were in the first row looking down at the orchestra- so amazing!!!!

After seeing Wicked, we decided to take the subway all the way to the top of Central Park, and walked the whole way down. The length of the park is 2.5 miles. We saw waterfalls, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, runners, dogs frolicking, and everything was perfectly dusted with snow!

We were pretty bundled up, but were still soaked after our adventure in the Big Apple.

Here's a mom pulling her son on a sled back home after a day of fun. School was even canceled due to the weather.

I had a wonderful two days with you in NY, Jesse! Thank you for being such a fun husband.

In case you were wondering, Madison had a delightful stay with Papa, Mimi, and Aunt Dottie while we were gone.