Vibrant Village...

On Monday we took ourselves on a short walking tour that Pops had found in a book. The walk started off at the bottom of 5th Avenue in Washington Square Park and meandered through the West Village towards the river.

Washington Square Park was a fantastic place to start, it's such a beautiful and peaceful little park round the corner(ish) from work at the bottom of 5th Avenue. It wasn't the sunniest of days, but the colours of the trees and flower beds looked beautiful and autumnal.

The Park always seems to be a hive of activity, with people playing chess, lots of holiday makers, travellers, street performers and buskers - and on Monday, film crews! We saw two different sets of people filming...

From the park we walked up a couple of blocks on 5th Avenue until we got to West 10th street, where we took a left and walked further into the village, passing lots of beautiful little town houses, some of which used to be home to folks like Mark Twain and e.e.cummings...

The colours were absolutely amazing - some people had even gone to the trouble of colour co-ordinating their houses and scooters...

We continued to walk through the village, onto Greenwich Avenue and passed lots of beautiful hosues and little shops, the whole village felt very peaceful and quiet on that Monday morning, and everything looked stunning with all the bold colours...

In the middle of the little tour was the area where the Gay Right Riots kicked off, (very close to Gay Street!) - so there were a few statue figures in a small park to commemorate/celebrate the event...

There are quite a few very upmarket shops around the Perry Street and Greenwich Avenue area, a lot of big names with very small boutique style shops, there's Hilfiger, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren - all sorts, some of them look lovely and Christmassy already...

Along our walk we found the Spotted Pig restaurant. I've read about Spotted Pig a lot, it's run by some famous chef and is supposed to do amazing burgers, but apparently it's quite hard to get in to - there's even a secret private dining room for celebrities! The outside of the restaurant looked very autumnal...

There were two very friendly looking people sitting on the bench outside the restaurant...

After Greenwich Village, the walk carried on towards the Hudson River, so we strolled along there for a few blocks and then headed back inland towards the Meatpacking District, passing some more fancy restaurants and great looking shops, like the Vitra shop.

We stopped off at the Chelsea Market for some delicious milkshakes and coke floats before making our way back to the hotel. It was such a perfect relaxing way to spend the day, and such a brilliant way to see a new part of Manhattan. There are some other walks in the little guide book, so I think we'll be doing some more of them in the future - it was brilliant.