Armchair Exploring: Cool sites to discover off-the-beaten-path New York

Running around and exploring New York is great, but sometimes with kids and toddlers on the scene you'd rather just explore the city from the comfort of your desk chair. This post is a collection of sites that take you to great off the beaten track places around NYC without ever getting off your...laptop.

Whether you use it as a little fantasy armchair exploring or to plan real excursions to tote the kids on, either way you'll get a cool reminder of all the nooks and crannies that make New York City amazing and endlessly fun to explore.

Forget about going outside. You can get lost without ever leaving your apartment on Forgotten NY. One of my all-time favorite NYC sites, Forgotten NY takes you on photographic tours of the most interesting and unusual parts of the city. Get lost in the many pages of this site for hours just cruising around all the places you could explore and then go out and check one out for yourself using this site as your guide. Or buy the book.

Playing with Blocks isn't as much fun to read as some of the others mainly because it doesn't have pictures. It's a column that has been reprinted from NY Press onto this blog and is a depiction of the city block by block. Still fun and interesting and great if you are thinking of moving to a block and want to know what it's like.

The Bridge and Tunnel Club is an encyclopedic site that not only appears to have a photographic walking tour of every location in NYC, but has a great nav bar with tons of useful links and an interesting blog. You won't find the commentary and sifting that you get with Forgotten New York, but if you ever wanted to know what's on Randall's Island without going there or see what Staten Island looks like up close, this is the site to do it.

You know those totally New York moments that you can only discover randomly by being out in the streets at the right time and the right place? A Test of Will is the right place and the right time, all the time. This site is one lone photographer's journal of NYC and somehow he captures the most amazing little slices of life in beautiful, poignant, funny and artistic photographs every day.

New York City Walk is the online journal of a guy who decided to walk every single block of Manhattan. And he did it, literally. On the site you can see his photographs and notes on his odyssey with the highlights listed on an interactive map and a huge gallery of photos depicting all the rest. It's really fun to walk the city a day in his shoes. Try it.

And if all this doesn't leave you inspired to get out and explore with the kids try picking up a copy of City Walks with Kids: New York. This book has 50 walks that will take you around the city for fun, quirky adventures and requisite kid pt-stops along the way.

Or check out some of the fun outings in the Mommy Poppins excursions category.