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Start Relaxing While You Plan Your Perfect Getaway

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of VacationRenter. All opinions are 100% mine.

We recently started our vacation planning for 2019, and compiled a bucket list of the places we’d love to visit and things we’d like to do. We have several weeks open throughout the year so I started to research everything, particularly places to stay while we travel. It took hours upon hours as I bookmarked dozens of sites and compiled growing lists in my notebook. I finally just gave up and realized it was too frustrating to plan what was supposed to be fun. Why was it so hard?

Luckily, I was shortly after introduced to VacationRenters, this traveler’s new best friend, and it changed everything. We know where we want to go, we know we need to rent accommodations, and we just wanted to have an easy way of accessing the information without spending hours searching through travel books or online sites. With VacationRenter, we can see millions of vacation rental properties in on place, without having to compare across multiple sites and take notes and bookmarks and all the rest. VacationRenter removes the pain of finding and booking the perfect accommodations for us, so we can travel confidently and focus instead of having a great time.

manhattan taxis

Vacations planning should be fun too

VacationRenters is a great way to save time and effort, and I was surprised to find non-traditional accommodations available too. I love the idea of renting an apartment for a week with everything we could need, instead of only finding busy hotel options… this is amazing! We want to have a getaway during President’s week in February, and I loved the options I found on VacationRenter.com (including many I didn’t find elsewhere).

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Ready to reduce your time bouncing between hotel and online travel agency sites? Just bookmark VacationRenter.com to see all listings in one spot, and get to planning the rest of your memories. Save your energy to have fun on your vacation!

Visiting New York?

I’ve lived in New York all my life, and have taken visiting friends on tours to get a taste of the city. I’ve also enjoyed it myself like a tourist, because I never wanted to be that person who lived someplace great but never actually appreciated it until I moved away. Everything is here! And if you are visiting for a few days, here are some things you must see and do!

My favorite things to do in New York:

1. Take in a Broadway show! Not only are they really amazing, but it’s fun to be able to say you saw Wicked on Broadway. People come to New York just to see Broadway shows, and those of us who live here love them too. There are so many to choose from, from funny to poignant, modern to past eras, and you can find all the shows currently playing, along with show times, seats available (ready to purchase), etc on Broadway.com.

2. We always take visitors on a bus tour (saves a small fortune in cab fares), and Big Apple Tours takes a spin that includes seeing everything from Central Park and Greenwich Village to Ground Zero and Wall Street in just four hours. If you are visiting for a very short trip, this might work for you.

I tend to favor New York Sight Seeing if you have more time, because it’s a hop on/hop off bus tour that lets you leave the bus at any stop point to see an area as long as you want before catching the next bus (your ticket lasts 24 hours and the buses come every 15 to 30 minutes). If you want to spend time visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shopping at some book stores or art shops that catch your eye, or have dinner in Little Italy at a world famous restaurant, you can, and a bus will be around when you are done to bring you to the next awesome landmark or location.

I really love these bus tours, and the add-on options such as helicopter rides to Ellis Island or to view the Empire State Building from the sky. They hit everywhere you might have on your bucket list- Yankee Stadium, the famous Brooklyn Bridge, China Town, Times Square, etc, and include admissions to most museums too, plus have optional tour bus lines that will take you to the other boroughs or a ferry rides to the Statue of Liberty. Just like VacationRenter.com has everything you need to book the perfect New York City stay in on place, NewYorkSightSeeing.com has everything you need to taste the Big Apple in one place too.

3. If you have kids, there is a lot to do with them too! Consider:

– Shopping favorites, like the M&Ms World store and the LEGO Store, will let kids be kids as they play while they shop and snack. A trip to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum will let your kids spend some time with the Ghostbusters, E.T., Albert Einstein, and more, and it’s really fun to take your pictures with them and see how realistic they look.

– Visiting the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum at Pier 86 for experience on real military ships and submarines, and spend some time at all the many exhibits that both showcase historical artifacts and teach about new technology on the horizon. We still visit almost every year as new ships are brought in and new exhibits are added. Also be sure to check out the American Museum of Natural History (amazing for both adults and children), for real T-Rex fossils and mummies!

– Taking a train ride to the Long Island Children’s Museum. This museum has interactive exhibits for children to enjoy and learn from, plus it is within walking distance of the Cradle of Aviation Museum and Firefighter’s Museum and a close drive to more. This area is famously called Museum Row, and since beautiful Long Island is rife with gorgeous beaches, amazing restaurants, beautiful boardwalks, I would encourage you to find an excuse to head out this way a bit 😉

– The Bronx Zoo, which is massive and may take two days to fully enjoy. There are gorillas, giraffes, sea lions, bears, anacondas, bald eagles, snow leopards, and more! This is one of the largest and most famous zoos in the world, and if your children love animals, this is a must see.

– A Disney Broadway show like Frozen or Aladdin, or (my personal favorite) the Lion King- they are for every age.

Visit Vacation Rentals to plan your perfect getaway, and bookmark this page if you plan to visit New York!

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