We got the 1000am "Gold" Vamoose bus to NYC. Vamoose website is here.
The pickup was very near the Bethesda Metro Station.
The WIFI on the bus worked most of the time but it was a nice ride with lots of legroom ($110 each for the round trip- the regular non gold would have been a $60 round trip).
We got to NYC about 140pm which was faster than the schedule.
The stop in NYC is at 30th St and 7th Ave near Penn Station. It took almost no time to get a cab to our hotel in the theatre district.
We got to the hotel and unpacked and rested a bit.
Then we took a walk to the Rockefeller Center. The part of Rockefeller Center where you buy tickets to the top of the Rock was overheated. I found this true of many other venues (e.g., both museums, the Opera, the hotel).
The first image is Ann and our little panda (we bring a stuffed animal to our trips for company and to 'scale pictures' - there is also a stuffed animal blog). There is snow on the roof at the "Top of the Rock". As with most of the pictures on this blog, clicking on the image will enlarge it and sometimes clicking on it twice will enlarge it a lot.
The view is facing Northeast. The tall building is 432 Park Avenue which is the tallest apartment building in the Western Hemisphere (1300' occupied, 1400' if you count the tower on its top).
The observation deck of the Rockefeller Center is on the 66th and 67th floors. The image is from the 66th floor about 830' above ground.
We stayed until sunset which was really fabulous.
In the image, the Empire State Building is in the middle, the Bank of America Tower on the right.
The guy who took this picture in 2012, Robert Strachan, put it on the internet with some other pictures at this site.
It was MLK day so the traffic wasn't as heavy as usual and the weather was good.
We took advantage of this to do a hop on hop off bus tour of downtown (south of 50th Street).
We got off at the 9-11 memorial area. The memorial is in the first image (from the internet).
Before we saw the memorial and the 9-11 museum, we looked in on the oculus which is a structure that covers the NYC terminal station of the Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH).
This station had just been fully completed in December 2016 (with a final connection to the NYC subway system) but the Oculus superstructure had been completed in March 2016.
The Oculus is a one of kind structure. The cost of design was, by itself, about $500M (this is partly because it was designed several times in response to various important people's opinions). The structural beams are huge. The skylight at the top is over 350' long and the cost of construction was about $1B. It would have been more but the original idea of a retractable skylight and some other enhancements were not implemented.
The cost of the PATH station, the Oculus and the underground connections to the subway and other local destinations was about $5B. This makes it the most costly transit station yet built.
The final image (from the internet) shows the Oculus from the outside.
We departed our touring and went to eat supper at the famous 2nd Avenue Deli. This is currently the most famous legacy kosher deli in NYC since the Carnegie Deli closed.
Excellent corned beef and strudel.
Then we took a cab (wait time again about 15 seconds) to the Hirshfeld Theater where the musical "Kinky Boots" was playing.
The Al Hirshfeld theater is named after a famous caricaturist. He produced thousands of caricatures for the New Yorker, the NY Times and for advertising musicals and reviews of musicals.
In the image, Ann is next to an picture from the 1976 musical "Dracula". The musical starred Frank Langella who also starred in the movie version. We saw that movie the night before Beth was born in 1979
The musical is a delightful 'happy ending' story (image from the internet) about a man who inherits a shoe factory. He discovers the traditional business plan doesn't work but stumbles into an idea to make shoes for transvestites (the transvestites were suffering because women's shoes didn't have enough support for a man's weight and balance).
The music and lyrics for all the songs were written by Cindy Lauper of 1980s fame.
We then walked back to the hotel which was only a few blocks away.
I had great expectation of this museum.
The museum exceeded those expectations.
Ann took the highlight tour which began with some Japanese painting then 19th century American then some 20th century African.
I spent more time on the ancient art.
The first image is (from the internet) from the palace of Sargon II (8th century BCE). It was about 6 feet high.
The second image is (from the internet) an Etruscan chariot from the 6th century BCE. It is about 7 feet long and made of copper.
There are friezes on the front and sides of the chariot that are scenes from the life of Achilles and these are consistent with the text of the Illiad (which shows that Etruscans knew a lot about that book - even though it was a presumably very different culture).
There was also a recreation of part of the palace of Ashurbanipal, a ruler of Assyria (a century after Sargon II). It was incredible but I couldn't find a good image.
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After the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was still raining so we took a cab (again the wait time was about 15 seconds) to the Natural History Museum. The latter is on the other side of Central Park and on a nice day it would be pleasant walk.
image 1 is in the main entrance room - a dinosaur skeleton is behind Ann
The Natural History Museum was undergoing some work and a lot of the areas were closed. This was a problem for seeing everything but also a problem for getting around because the Museum is so big and we had to use some round about paths.
image 2 is us in front of one of the great mammal dioramas.
The museum has many of these and most of them are works of art. There are some that are about 40 feet across. About 10% or so have been completed in the past two years.
The third image is Martin with Theodore Roosevelt who was the inspiration for the great mammal dioramas.
I walked around a lot. Ann spent a lot of time in the minerals and gems section,
After the museums we took a cab to a restaurant near to Lincoln Center. The restaurant was kosher Italian (dairy).
The phrase 'Noi Due' means 'the two or us' or 'we two' or something similar. The phrase 'Poco ma buono' means 'little but good'. The restaurant is not that small but it is a few feet below street level a small street front.
After the restaurant we were a short walk to the Metropolitan Opera House.
We had tickets ($30 each plus a $20 service fee - not too bad), to Romeo et Juliette. The image (from the internet) is from Act 3 where the two are married by a priest (this should have been a happy ending but of course things went wrong soon after).
The metropolitan opera can seat 4000 with standing room. It probably held 2800 the night we were there.
The NYC Metropolitan Opera has some nice chandeliers also. However, in this respect, the opera theater at the Kennedy Center has a better one.
Nonetheless, the soprano's voice completely filled the hall and sounded marvelous. The opera company did a cute thing with the lighting in Act 4 when Juliette was singing a soliloquy while contemplating drinking a potion that would temporarily paralyze her. One spotlight was on Juliette, the other on the potion making it seem a duet (except the potion didn't sing).
Also, they put in something in the opera that Shakespeare didn't. With their last line (during the scene shown in the last image from Act 5- from the internet) they ask God for forgiveness - which seems a reasonable move to me given that suicide is a sin.
After the opera we took a cab back to the hotel.
We had some time before the bus left NYC so we did a walking tour of Times Square and the Theater District.
The first image is of us in the Times Square area.
The second image is of us, also in the Times Square area but this time in front of the statue of George M Cohan (died 1942) songsmith (over 300 songs), director (4 well known musicals) actor (four films) and other creative endeavors.
Actually, this part of the area is known as Duffy Park because it also has a statue of a Father Francis Patrick Duffy (died 1932) who was the most decorated chaplain ever in the US Army (served in France in WWI) and then was the pastor of the Holy Cross Church in Hell's Kitchen. He was also known as a friend of actors (who then had a low reputation).
The theater district has a lot of store frontage and some of it becomes prop material for movies and so forth.
The third image shows Ann in front of the Wonka Shipping Department which is left over from a movie (I think).
The last image shows one of the props for sale in the theater district, a full scale R2D2 (I forgot to get the price on this).
Our little panda is on the R2D2 to show the scale (little panda is about 2" high).
After our walking tour, we went back to the hotel, picked up our stuff and had some schnitzl and wraps I got from a Chabad affiliated store (Schnitzl Express) just south of the theater district.
We then got a cab to the bus stop at 30th St and 7th Ave., boarded the bus about 4pm and got back to Bethesda about 8pm.
This station had just been fully completed in December 2016 (with a final connection to the NYC subway system) but the Oculus superstructure had been completed in March 2016. 
The cost of the PATH station, the Oculus and the underground connections to the subway and other local destinations was about $5B. This makes it the most costly transit station yet built. 
The Al Hirshfeld theater is named after a famous caricaturist. He produced thousands of caricatures for the New Yorker, the NY Times and for advertising musicals and reviews of musicals. 
Ann took the highlight tour which began with some Japanese painting then 19th century American then some 20th century African. 
image 2 is us in front of one of the great mammal dioramas. 
The third image is Martin with Theodore Roosevelt who was the inspiration for the great mammal dioramas.
The second image is of us, also in the Times Square area but this time in front of the statue of George M Cohan (died 1942) songsmith (over 300 songs), director (4 well known musicals) actor (four films) and other creative endeavors. 
The theater district has a lot of store frontage and some of it becomes prop material for movies and so forth.
The last image shows one of the props for sale in the theater district, a full scale R2D2 (I forgot to get the price on this).