We packed as much as we could on Saturday night, anticipating an early morning on Sunday. When we woke up, we noticed rain and lots of it!! It was a steady rain and there was no end in sight. We dropped in the closet souvenir shop for some I Heart NY ponchos to get us through the walk. We made our way to NBC Studios for our tour!
NBC Studio Tour
When you purchase tickets for the tour, you're not told which studios you'll visit, just that it'll be 2-3. Lucky for us, we were on a morning tour, which allowed for us to see the sets of The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live and Nightly News with Lester Holt. We were not allowed to take photos on the tour but there was an interactive portion at the end! http://www.thetouratnbcstudios.com/ Some cool points of the tour:
The Tonight Show is actually filmed at 5:00pm. Most of the time, Jimmy Fallon will enter the building from off the street. He "sneaks" in with regular clothes, beanie and sunglasses to help disguise himself. The audience seats are made from the same leather as Lamborghini seats.
Saturday Night Live set was the coolest. It holds about 200 people. There are a lot of moving parts to this set. Some scenes are not filmed directly in the eye of the audience so there are large monitors for the crowd to watch and react in real time.
In both studios, there are mics hung from the ceiling throughout the audience to get real time reactions. What you hear on TV is real and not a laugh track.
Lester Holt's studio, was small, no audience, but still neat to see.
One of the most interesting parts was viewing the control rooms for audio, graphics, video, etc. There are a lot of moving parts to each of these shows. At the end of the tour, there was an interactive portion. Every member of our tour group (about 12 people) got to play a role in a scene from The Tonight Show. I played the role of the "guest," mainly because the guides asked twice and no one was volunteering, lol. Lauren was in the house band and Brittney worked behind the scenes in the control room. Here's a clip of how that turned out! If the video takes a while to load below, just use this link :) http://onair.thetouratnbcstudios.com/9E02FCC0
It was very enjoyable and I'm glad we'll have this video forever to remind us of our time there!
Top of the Rock
We made our way to Top of the Rock (just around the corner from our NBC Tour.) As soon as we arrived, we were greeted with a big ole "There's 0% visibility at the top." Cool thing to note is you could have exchanged your tickets for another day. Unfortunately, it was our last day so we had to make our way to the top. We got to the first look out and decided to go up one more floor. Stepped outside, walked around the corner, couldn't see much at all. The wind was blowing the rain right into our faces so we decided to go back inside. Although, it was super challenging to see the steps for the escalator through the rain and the wind blowing our ponchos in our faces. We did manage to grab one photo! https://www.topoftherocknyc.com/
We worked up an appetite and a need for warmth!! One very NYC food we hadn't had yet was bagels! We found a great bagel shop on Yelp and headed there!
Liberty Bagels
This was a very cute, "shotgun home" style bagel shop. You could try any combination of bagel and cream cheese prior to purchasing. We all had one sample and all ended up purchasing the full size of our samples.
Our choices:
Brittney: Everything bagel with scallion cream cheese
Lauren: Rainbow bagel with birthday cake cream cheese
Megan: Everything bagel with bacon scallion cream cheese
They were all very delicious and filling! There was so much cream cheese inside the bagel! Definitely recommend and will go back!
At this point, our trip was coming to an end. We headed back to the hotel to do our final packing. Since the rain was not letting up we decided to head to the airport early. Let's be honest, we were all worried our bags would be overweight. Brittney and I were fine...Lauren on the other hand. I believe it was about 4 lbs over weight, if I remember correctly. This photo depicts the hard work it took her and Brittney to make some adjustments and close Lauren's carry on. Spoiler alert: after their efforts, the suitcase was now eligible for the flight, free of charge!
We enjoyed our last few minutes together sitting in the crowded terminal. Brittney and I departed on a nonstop flight for home around 3:40. Lauren left NYC close to 6:00 with a stop in STL, finally making it home to Tulsa around Midnight.
End of the day stats:
11,687 steps
5.5 miles