New Your City Pass

As mentioned in a previous post, while in NYC we used the NYC City Pass. What the City Pass does is give you some of the best tours and exhibits in one booklet. The New York pass included the Circle-Line Harbor cruise (mentioned in the previous post), Empire State Building, the MET, Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History. Our passes were good for 9 days and cost $65 each. This was great for us because we spent 2 days in New York before taking our 5 day cruise, and then another full day in New York.

One feature of the pass that worked out well for us was that we got to skip the line to purchase tickets at the Empire State Building, and includes the audio tour option which is a added fee for others. The audio tour was well worth it, narrated by George Carlin, you get the history of multiple sites you see from specific spots on the observation deck of the building. We tried doing the tour around 9PM on a Saturday and the line just to get in the building (don't get to skip this line) went around the building. So we decided to go Sunday Morning. This was a smart thing for us to do. We practically walked right in. The line inside to get to the elevators moved quickly (especially because we didn't have to go to the ticket booth). Even tho it was not anywhere near as busy as it was the night before, the observation deck was packed. I shutter to think how packed it was at 9 the night before.

We went to the MET (Metropolitan Museum) at night. This was a treat because the MET is located on the east side of Central Park and also has an observation deck up top (that happens to have a cocktail bar setup). It made for a perfect view of downtown all lit up.

The only thing I would suggest to anyone interested in the pass is that you need to allow yourself a lot of time for the museums. We tend to put things on a tight schedule and really wish we had given a lot more time to the museums. Not just the ones offered with the city pass, but New York has more museums than any where else. Trust me there is a museum for just about anyone, even people that don't like museums.