With the high cost of airline tickets to travel home for Thanksgiving, Jody and I decided that we'd make the most of the holiday on our own this year. One of the things on our "to do list" while in the Northeast was to attend the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Since Jody is 4 months pregnant we came to realization that next year would be practically impossible to attend the parade since we'll have a 6 month old baby. The stars sort of aligned as we found a good deal on a nice hotel right on Central Park South, which is right by the parade's route. From the hotel we could easily get a front row seat on the parade route and get back to the hotel and out of the city afterward.
Wednesday night we headed to the city after Cace got off work and we had dinner at this fantastic restaurant called Buddakan, which came as a recommendation from one of my co-workers. The restaurant was beautiful and the food was amazing!
Afterward dinner Cace's co-worker suggested we head next door to the Chelsea Market for a milkshake at The Milk Bar. We gave it a shot and were pleasantly surprised...the milkshakes were awesome!!
The Chelsea Market is this really cool, funky little grocery market with a bunch of bakeries and grocery outlets.
After dinner and dessert we headed uptown to check out the inflating of the parade balloons. We had higher expectations that what we actually saw. They inflate and store the balloons on two streets (81st and 79th), which is on the North and South sides of the Museum of Natural History. By the time we got there all the balloons had been inflated. The streets were packed, as you can see in the pictures.
Thursday morning we headed down to get our seats at 6 am (yes, that's 3 hours before the parade began). There was already a crowd gathering on every street so we had to get a spot quickly. Jody held down a spot behind a really nice family from Queens while I ran into Starbucks for a Hot Chocolate run. It was a brisk, cold morning but we had a great time watching the parade. It really was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and is one that we'll always remember. If you ever get the chance we highly recommend you take the family to the parade, as it is quite different watching it in person.
The Muppets made an apperarance...
...even Oscar popped in!
Ingrid Michaelson
Scotty McCreery
The one and only Neil Diamond. His float stopped right in front of us as they started playing "Sweet Caroline". I swear he looked right at me when we sang "Sweet Caroline...bah bah bah"!
NYPD Mounted Unit (the guys on pooper scooper duty behind them got huge applause)
The below video might have been the best part of the entire parade!!
A bunch of dudes dressed up like fairies
And, last but not least, Santa and Mrs. Clause wrapped up the parade.
It was a ton of fun. Now onward to Christmas!!
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