We beg of you, do not…
TAKE A TWILIGHT CARRIAGE RIDE IN CENTRAL PARK

You may recall the scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway take a romantic, private, horse-drawn carriage ride through Central Park, quipping their way through the leafy quiet. We regret to inform you that your carriage ride will be nothing like that experience. The horse will seem tired, the driver's patter will be even less entertaining than Mia Farrow's memoirs, and you'll spend the entire ride crawling along the park's main drives, staring at the back of another carriage, and enduring dirty looks from locals and animal lovers.

Instead…
GET UP EARLY AND WALK THROUGH CENTRAL PARK

The park is at its most magical in the morning, when the crowds are thin and the green lawns are fresh, and you'll want to wander off the main roads and explore its 843 acres at your own pace. You might even want to, you know, stop and smell some flowers—or at least something more aromatic than horse poo. So get up early one morning, grab a cup of joe and a roll from a street cart, and eat your breakfast walking some of the park's woodsier byways. Enter the park from either Fifth Avenue or Central Park West in the mid-Seventies, and head toward the center: This latitude offers easy access to some of the park's best features. You can drift around the marshy shores of the lake, climb Pilgrim Hill near the Conservatory Water, or stand still with a view to the east and watch for Pale Male and Lola, the famous red-tailed hawks who use an apartment building on Fifth Avenue as a launchpad for their own Central Park explorations.—Siobhan Adcock

Next: The best and worst meals with a view in New York