No trip to the Big Apple is complete without a visit to Central Park.

Central Park consists of 843 acres (or nearly 3.5 square kilometres) of manicured gardens, play grounds, sports fields and statues.

During our stay we put aside half a day to wander around. It was the start of May and an unusually cold and dreary day, but we made the most of it anyway. We decided to catch the subway to 110 Street Station Central Park North, which is in the Harlem district. From there you enter into the Charles A. Dana Discovery Centre where we picked up a map and got some helpful tips from the staff.

We continued on around the Harlem Meer to the Conservatory Gardens. The gardens had some beautiful tulips throughout and benches to stop and enjoy the flowers.

After finishing in the gardens we cut across The Ravine, over to the Glen Span Arch and around the baseball fields. This part is more of a natural landscape with rocks and lush grasses.

We then carried on to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir which is the largest surface water area, taking up almost a quarter of the whole park itself. Many people jog or walk around the outside of the reservoir and it makes for some lovely scenery.

Just after the reservoir is the Great Lawn, which is full of more baseball fields. The Great Lawn is about the halfway point and is adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art which sits on the Upper East Side of the Park. Near here is the Central Park Conservancy which has a little gift shop.

The other side of the Great Lawn is The Lake, with beautiful lookout points and The Bow Bridge which looks like it belongs in a Disney Princess movie. By this point we were getting pretty hungry so we carried on over to Le Pain Quotidien which was the first cafe we were able to find. After getting a sandwich and a drink to fill us up, we backtracked slightly to Bethesda Terrace which most people would probably recognise from the Avengers movies.

To the east is the Alice in Wonderland statue, and the Conservatory Water which was featured in the Stuart Little movies. There is also a Hans Christian Anderson statue in the same area, but we didn’t go past it.

We headed south again, to the Balto Statue, which is to celebrate a dog that delivered medicine to children in Alaska. He is also featured in a Disney movie Togo. As you can see there are a lot of movie and literary references around the park! Past here is the ice skating rink but of course in May it was shut down.

We then walked over to the Dipway Arch and then out to W 59th Street and our tour was complete. Overall it took us about 6 hours of walking which seems like a lot, but there is so much to see you will barely notice.

If you ever have spare time in NYC I highly recommend you put wandering in Central Park at the top of your list.