Photos of New York City, including Times Square, Wall Street, Chinatown, Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMOA)

It took us 25 years to get around to visiting New York City.

We never had much interest in visiting before because we preferred the West. By last year (2009), we had seen everything we wanted to in the West and were looking for something new to celebrate Susie's 60th birthday.

A co-worker loves New York and visits often. She said we'd like it. I asked another co-worker who lived there and he said we'd like it. So, we tried it...

We spent a week in September 2010. We were fortunate that the economy had an impact on hotel rates. We were able to book the Country Inn & Suites, near Queensboro Plaza, one stop from Manhattan, for $85 and that included a nice breakfast.

It was late afternoon by the time we settled into our hotel. We hopped a subway to Times Square to check out the neon and find dinner. The Times Square neon is second only to that in Vegas.

We returned to Times Square frequently because it really is where much of the entertainment and dining is located. Restaurant Row is close to Broadway, the Hard Rock is here. And its nice to just sit out in the pedestrian area and watch the world go by when the weather is mild.

The McDonald's here is now he busiest I've seen yet (replacing the one in Barcelona's Ramblas pedestrian district) and sometimes I decided the wait for their big $1 iced tea wasn't worth it.

After taking in the lights, we we enjoyed a huge bowl of Japanese noodles at Sapporo, near Broadway. You can pay a lot for dinner in this town, but we were stuffed for about $20, which included an appetizer of ten dumplings and a draft Japanese beer (Sapporo, for which the restaurant is named). Unfortunately, we were too stuffed to partake of the wonderful looking desserts we encountered on the way back to the subway.


	Yummy!	Times Square station mural