We’ve been fortunate enough to visit New York as a family a number of times now, so have visited all of the “must do” sights. The kids have favorite places and sights they always enjoy repeating (Sam would spend every day at the baseball field in Central Park if he had his way), but I wanted to find us something new, and boy, did I find us a great option.
I was doing a little ‘research’ in Saks on our first day and noticed a large Easter egg.
I thought it was just part of the Easter store decorations until I came across another one on another floor that looked completely different.
This time I noticed the sign on the plinth (all those years reading Nancy Drew as a child clearly coming to the fore) and found there was an egg hunt going on in NYC, with 267 eggs decorated by a wide variety of artists hidden across the 5 boroughs of New York City.
There is nothing our family loves more than a quest, so with Saks bags in tow, I hurried back to the hotel to brief the team on our mission. We knew we were under the pump with the eggs in situ for only two more days before they were all relocated to Rockefeller Plaza for Easter, but we downloaded the app which held a map of the egg locations and set about hunting them down.
One of our first stops was Fabergé, who are the main sponsors. They were welcoming egg hunters into their beautiful store to scan the barcode on the egg to ‘crack it’ — which all competitive egg hunters would know is the way to add them to your basket tally!
From there it was a race around the city, collecting eggs in all kinds of locations and visiting places we had never previously been. This beautiful egg was located in a restaurant on the 9th floor in Columbus Circle that I didn’t even know existed. It had beautiful views of Central Park. We will definitely come back and eat there.
While the male members of the team headed to Yankee Stadium, Sascha and I upheld the family’s honour and kept searching. We got strategic and hit some big egg caches to bump up our tally — Time Warner Centre in Columbus Circle had some great eggs including the one below that we felt we must rightfully claim as Aussies.
And this super cute knitted one with rabbit ears!
We hit pay dirt at Rockefeller Plaza, which would ultimately be the home of all of the eggs, but found plenty there already to add to our tally.
My absolute favourite was Humpty Dumpty, placed in a picture perfect location.
Sascha was starting to fade, but I’d heard a rumour from a fellow egg hunter that the highly prized mobile Where’s Waldo (or Wally as he is known in Australia) egg had been sighted at Laduree in Soho. So we jumped in a cab and went straight to West Broadway, with Sascha happy with the promise that even if he wasn’t there at least we could have a macaron!
We got him (and a macaron) and amazed the boys with our day’s tally.
Luck appeared to be on our side when early up the next day we spotted our other highly prized target, the mobile egg car but we were devastated to find it was now egg-less!
This ended up being the story of our day and while we managed to track down a few more, we found many had been picked up to head to Rockefeller Plaza for the big Easter display. The one that hurt most was the highly prized monkey in a spaceship egg that had left only 2 minutes prior!
We had a great time egg hunting and collected a very respectable 52 eggs in our short time.
More importantly, we saw parts of the city we had never seen before and enjoyed some great art and imaginative thinking courtesy of the egg designers. As always, the experience was easily captured with Glass.
