Do you remember sleepover nights when you were young where you and your friends broke into a pillow fight? Add in an extra hundred people or two and you get the pillow fight that took place in Washington Square Park this weekend!

You heard me right.. A huge pillow fight took place in the city this weekend to honor the World’s 6th Pillow Fight Day and New York City’s 8th Annual Pillow Fight! And I was right there in the center of action to check it out!

Was it as awesome as it sounds? I sure thought it was entertaining! I wasn’t the only one either. The park was packed of people participating in the three hour long event (coming and going of course) as well as bystanders. Definitely a funny site to see!

The apartment market is something that I’ve kind of gotten caught up in since moving to the city. I think part of it is the fascination with how truly different the market is here than any other city in the country and the other half is always being on the hunt for the best deal. Now, I’m not sure the term “best deal” really applies to any apartment in New York but I’m using that term relative to the market. It’s funny because what you pay for rent generally isn’t a hot topic of conversation in other cities I’ve lived in, but here.. It’s almost like bragging rights if you’re getting a decent deal. During my time in the city I’ve progressively gotten worse at day-dreaming about apartments to the point where I can tell you the going rates in just about every neighborhood in Manhattan and some of Brooklyn and Jersey City. If anything, I guess if PR doesn’t work out for me, maybe there’s a career option in real estate lol!

I’ve come to terms that at the end of my current lease (this summer) we will probably be saying goodbye to our first New York apartment and move onto something else. That “something else” of which I can plan on spending more money than I currently am. For this reason, I’ve been on the hunt for finding neighborhoods I can get more bang for my buck. With the going rate of a cheap studio in my current neighborhood coming in at $1,500+ for a fee-apartment and $1,675+ for a no-fee for a measly 250-350 square feet I’m all ears for options. In case I haven’t mentioned before, New York apartments are shown by brokers of which you have to pay a fee, usually between 12% and 15% of the yearly rent, upon signing a lease. When the market was worse you could find no-fee apartments, apartments without brokers fees, easier but with the upturn it’s become harder to find affordable no-fee apartments. Don’t let me forget that to get approved most buildings want you to make 40x the yearly rent. 80-100x if you have a guarantor.

One neighborhood that I recently started looking into is called Inwood. It’s located on the very north tip of the Upper West Side, right below the Bronx. I met a girl at a networking event that couldn’t stop gushing about her apartment and after telling me her and her boyfriend have a 2 bedroom for $1,650, I started to do my research! My biggest concern being safety. the Upper East Side is one of the safest neighborhoods in Manhattan and yet I still don’t like walking around after dark by myself. You never know! After my research I found that the area west of Broadway is populated mostly with middle class families and is considered a very up-and-coming area. The crime rate is relatively low in Inwood, ranking the 3rd safest neighborhood in Manhattan, although I read it’s a tougher community east of Broadway.

After doing some research and finding you can get a 1 bedroom fee-apartment for $1,275+ I had to take a trip up there! It’s a little bit of a hike from the Upper East Side (45 mins) because we went to the Upper West Side first, but it turns out it is about a 25 minute subway ride north from where I work, so it wouldn’t be a bad commute.

We started by taking a walk in Inwood Hill Park where we were welcomed with this little guy. I was so excited to actually see a black squirrel! There are two main parks up there, Inwood Hill Park, which is very large and then Isham Park, where they host a farmer’s market every Saturday. The area came across very cute. It’s definitely mostly residential, but I enjoyed the green space. I’m sure it’s really nice in the summer too!

We went up and down the streets so that I could mark off which ones I thought would be acceptable when my apartment hunt comes around.

For the most part I felt pretty safe up there, but I’m not sure if I would have felt differently if I had been by myself. The area west of Broadway is really cute as well as close to Columbia’s football field. You really feel like you’ve left Manhattan, which is kind of a nice change of pace. It’s also only one stop north to the Bronx where there is a super Target! You can bet I also went up there and checked it out!

After checking out the neighborhood overall I did think it was a cute area. For the prices of apartments and staying in Manhattan (even if only at the tip) in a safer area you really can’t beat it. For me, one downfall was even though I felt relatively comfortable in Inwood, the train ride up there goes through every stop in Harlem, which I can tell you I would not feel comfortable riding up there by myself… Another issue is that it would make seeing Chris and my friends a little more difficult since most of them live on the Upper East Side, which isn’t the easiest commute. 

I think if I had friends up there or was living with someone else it would be higher at my contenders list, but I am happy I checked it out!

For Christmas this year I decided to go the adventure route and got him a gift certificate to go snow tubing at a nearby resort, also complete with all of the snow gear needed. Call it my latest attempt to put a little dose of the great outdoors into this city boy’s life! 

After a series of busy weekends, we were finally able to head up to the mountain! When you think of New York City, mountains are definitely not something that comes to mind unless you want to count skyscrapers. It actually turns out that there are a number of resorts within 2 hours of the city! Not as close as the old Claw at home, but not bad. After doing some research I found a number of different bus and shuttle services that take groups from the city to the slopes each weekend. I’m not much of a skier (having only gone twice) and after seeing Chris on ice skates last year I decided that tubing was definitely the safest option for both of us! After comparing a lot of the bus services (that mostly cater to skiers and snowboarders) I decided that going to Mountain Creek was our best option. The resort is only an hour and a half from the city and the bus picks up at the main bus terminal, Port Authority. 

The only part of our trip I wasn’t that excited about was the alarm clock going off. The bus left Port Authority at 7:30 and is about 40 minutes from our apartments by subway, so needless to say it was an early morning! Nothing an orange juice (iced coffee for him) and some 7/11 donuts couldn’t solve though! Once we were on the bus we got a nice little nap on the way up to the mountain too.

The day we went up there was absolutely gorgeous! Clear, sunny and a little brisk. Our snow gear kept us nice and toasty though!

It’s interesting to me because Mountain Creek is actually mostly made up of man-made snow. This was kind of a new concept to someone who grew up right on the plateau of the mountain, but real or man-made, the crowds flooded to the resort! 

Our tubing session was a couple hours after our bus arrived so we spent some time exploring the resort before the crowds really took over.  It was a really nice place! They had a number of restaurants and a beer garden outside in front of a fire with german food, which was pretty awesome in my book.

After a few hours of exploring we headed over to the tubing area called “The Drop Zone”. I hadn’t been tubing since I was younger and most of the people lining up for our session were under the age of 10, but I was still hopeful that it would be fun! At least crossing my fingers in hopes that I didn’t end up giving a really lame Christmas present!

Luckily my memory served me well and it was just as awesome as I remembered it! We may have been the only adults without kids at the park, but we still had a blast! With 15 lanes to pick from we had so much fun deciding which lanes were the fastest. It didn’t take long for Chris to somehow master the art of speed down the hills, somehow always hitting the blob (as I called it), which was a big inflatable balloon at the bottom of the slopes that you would run into if the mats at the bottom of the hill didn’t slow you down enough. I’m not sure how he managed it, but he literally hit it every time.

After our two hours were up we were exhausted and ready to head back to the lodge for some grub! Tubing can be tiring! As a bonus to our tubing tickets we also got free tickets to one of their new attractions called the soaring eagle. It basically looked like a chairlift but was on a zip line. I like to think I’m not a total chicken but something about going backwards really freaks me out and this did exactly that. So you can bet your bottom dollar I was trying to talk Chris out of making me do it.. but when two 7 year old girls got off right in front of us yelling let’s do it again, I knew I didn’t have much of a case to back out. I pretty much had a death grip on Chris’ arm the entire time, but I am proud to say I did do it! Woh hoh! 

After the soaring eagle we headed to one of their outdoor fires and enjoyed the rest of the day keeping warm and watching the skiers and snowboarders come down the hill! We had such a great time and I’m really happy I looked into it! A lot of people just assume there isn’t anything for them to do at the mountain if they don’t ski or snowboard so this is a good reminder that tubing is the perfect way to have fun and get out in the snow! I’d definitely recommend Mountain Creek to anyone in the tri-state area! It also turns into a water slide park in the summer so we just might have to check that out too!