1. We used homeway.com to rent an apartment rather than a hotel. This was a great experience for us. The site itself is easy to use and allows for really good filtering so you can find what you are looking for rather easily. Staying in an apartment rather than a hotel gave us four important benefits:

- Location: We were one block from the Natural History Museum on the Upper West Side,  two blocks from Central Park, and a block from the subway. This was ideal.

- Laundry: The building had a washer and dryer so we only packed for 4 days, then did laundry one evening. It was great not having to pack as much as we would have had to for an 8 day trip if we had no laundry. (While there are obviously laundromats we could have used near hotels, we felt more comfortable having one in the building.)

- Refrigerator: We walked to a nearby grocery store and bought food for the week, and stored our doggy-bags from restaurants in the full-size refrigerator. Hotels often have a fridge, but usually a very small one that at best would have fit a half gallon of milk and one doggy bag. 

- Value: For this location we paid much lower than we would have had we tried to find a hotel in a similar locale. It wasn’t a huge apartment, but we didn’t need it to be, we needed a place to sleep and occasionally eat.

2. During our planning my wife and I did some research to come up with a bunch of choices for things to do. This was one of the occasions that social media is your friend. I put a message on facebook, twitter, and a couple e-lists I am on, and we got great recommendations from people who live there, as well as people who’ve vacationed there. The best notes were from two people I know in NYC who connected via facebook, and a high school friend of my wife who was also connected via facebook. We got tips we never would have known about. 

We then took about 30 choices and put them on a whiteboard and had our kids each markdown 3 “must-haves” and then star others they were interested in. This gave us the talking points to discuss with them which places to go, and how to group them. (Our kids are 14, 12, and 10 so they are old enough to engage in this planning.) We ended up with a great plan that didn’t keep us busy every minute of the day, and provided enough structure on certain days to allow us flex days as well. I’ll do a follow-up post on our itinerary.

3. I use tripit.com and the corresponding iphone app to keep track of all tracking and confirmation numbers, and my wife also prints them all off and has a packet for all of our reservations. This works very well.

4. I downloaded a couple NYC subway apps to my iphone and we printed off a subway map for the kids to study. We really wanted them to lead and to be comfortable. Giving them our itinerary ahead of time as well as the subway map gave them a comfort level that allowed them to give us directions. In fact, we generally had to tell them to SLOW down, as they were so far ahead of Jenn and me. 

5. This combination of digital and analog may seem like overkill but gave us the ease of use and at-our-fingertips that we desired.

6. We got the seven-day unlimited subway pass for each of us and this was the right call. We got our money’s worth and never worried about if we had credits on our subway card. We hopped on and off with impunity and riding the subway was a highlight for my 10 year old.

7. Bring comfortable shoes. We calculated on one day we walked over seven miles.

8. When you have a chance to get the audio tours, like at the Empire State Building, do so, it makes the experience so much better. Getting the history really adds to the trip.

Like I said I’ll be posting the itinerary in a follow-up post. It was an amazing trip.

“the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has.”

“Throwing away then all things, hold to these only which are few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain.”

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains…it is in they power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility.”

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus.

Links:

Harvard Classics, The Five Foot Bookshelf

Golden Sayings of Epictetus

Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

- Viktor Frankl

First off my wife uses a desktop software called Time & Chaos. We’ve been using it since 1995. It is fantastic, gives you a great view of contacts, appointments, and to do’s in one view. Anyway, they have an add-on that allows her to publish her calendar to google calendar. So she plugs in everything related to family activities and with 2 boys ages 14 and 12 and 1 girl age 10, we have soccer, basketball, track, tap dance, choir, physics club, cello, piano etc.

I have a mac and use ical on the mac. I subscribe to her my wife’s gcal. That way I can always see what we’ve got scheduled, and I can see it on my mac, iphone and ipad. And, just as important, since it is an additional calendar, when I want some sanity or a clean view of my work calendar, I can unclick and NOT view it.

I finally put up my Hugh MacLeod framed drawing in my den, and love it!

After that I went through the process of throwing out and putting away as much as possible. While it’s not quite as minimalistic as the great desktops on the aforementioned sites, I’m quite pleased with where it’s at.

Notes:

- 2 printers, one is wireless for the rest of the household, one has a scanner/copier which I need.
- MacBook Pro from 2007 (love it) with LG monitor (decent)
- Under the printer shelf are my USB chargeable items, 2 ipods, iphone, incase battery for the iphone.
- Labtec speakers with polk audio sub-woofers.
- LaCie 500gb hard drive using Time Machine to back-up my Mac.
- iPad (16gb wifi) with the iPad keyboard.
- To save energy I use a smart strip power cord, with my lamp as the control. The strip has three categories, the control, slots items that when the control is turned off are turned off as if they were unplugged, and a couple slots for items that you don’t want to be all the way off.

Finally got my Hugh MacLeod artwork up in my den.