Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade

This has been a bucket list item of mine for a long time — attending the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC! Johnny is always game for an adventure, so when I mentioned this as a possibility earlier this fall, he was all for it.

I love New York City around the holidays. All the shop windows are full of cheer, the streets are busy, and holiday decor is so bright and fun.

We stayed nearby the night before Thanksgiving, since we knew we’d have to be up early to get a good spot for the parade. We chose to stay in Lyndenhurst, near Secaucus (using my Marriott points, yayyyy), which is right near a train station.

Instead of taking NJ Transit, we opted to drive to Hoboken to take the PATH, which gets you to 33rd street in NYC, right in front of Macy’s. It’s about a 20 minute train ride, with a few stops.

A friend recommended that we travel into the city on Wednesday, planning our route for the next day. I’m so glad we did!

Since the PATH dropped us off at Macy’s, we decided to also take our friend’s recommendation to dine at The Cellar–the restaurant in the basement of Macy’s. You have to take the old wooden elevator to get to it – so neat!

Inside the restaurant, there are all of these photos of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades of the past. There are also glass boxes filled with old parade memorabilia — a perfect setting for our parade trip to NYC!

After dinner, we walked to Times Square for this essential selfie:

It started to get colder and then a misty rain started, so we darted into nearby Toys R Us to play. A definite must-see place in Times Square — there’s a giant ferris wheel in the center and there are alcoves upon alcoves of fun play centers.

After warming up a bit, we made the extra 40-block walk to the American Museum of Natural History — where the balloons for the parade are inflated!

Even though it was cold and rainy, and close to the closing time (they inflate from 3-10 p.m.), there was still a huge crowd of people. There’s a system for viewing the balloons – everyone has to enter through a certain street, funneling into a system of metal gates, then you go up one row and down another, which I think is supposed to keep the crowd moving.

The balloons are huge! I took a picture next to one for comparison.

The balloons are kept from hovering with a series of nets. It was so cool to see them up close. I highly recommend including the balloon inflation on your Thanksgiving Day Parade adventure.

On Thanksgiving morning, we got up around 5:30 and got to Hoboken to take the PATH around 6:00. We were in the city by 6:30. We took the PATH to the subway and took the 1 to 59th/Columbus Circle.

Immediately after exiting the subway, we made our way to Starbucks for red cups full of warm java. We also used the restroom one last time before the parade started (a definite thing to note — restrooms are scarce unless you plan to enter a facility like starbucks, where you have to be a paying customer to use them).

A crowd started forming at Columbus Circle, so we thought we’d stand there, but after overhearing a few conversations that people were having with the officers, we learned that the parade wouldn’t go around the circle, so we decided to walk toward the start (around 77th street) to find a better viewing spot.

We found a good spot between 68th and 69th (Central Park West). We got to our spot around 7:45 and the parade started at 9:00 a.m.

Our street-side seats (ha! There are only seats if you bring one, or if you get closer to the start of the parade, where you can sit on the Central Park wall. Otherwise, plan to stand!) had a great view. Everything felt so close–totally surreal after watching the parade on television for so many years.

Thomas the Tank was the first character balloon of the parade – one of my favorites!

A few other favorites — Hello Kitty, Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon, and the super large Spiderman.

There were tons of celebrities on the floats, too — like Miss America, one of the Jonas brothers, Meghan Trainor, and Pentatonix. Johnny and I felt so out of the culture loop as people around us were screaming for some of the celebrities and we were like “who?” But hey, I know Meghan Trainor, so I’m still cool.

I think the float that Miss America was on was my favorite — the Marion Carole Showboat. It’s a huge steamboat!

After the parade ended (which happens at different times on the 2.65 mile route), there was a flood of people everywhere. We thought we could walk down a few blocks and hop on the subway, but after three completely full cars passed us, we decided to keep walking and search for somewhere to have lunch. Best idea ever.

Tip – instead of trying to leave after the parade with 3.5 million of your new best friends, either make a reservation or be lucky like us to get somewhere as it opens, to enjoy a warm lunch while the crowds dissipate.

We made it back to New Jersey and had a relatively traffic-free ride back to Maryland. I’m so glad we got the chance to share in this experience!