One of the places I have always wanted to see is New York City. It's the polar opposite of where I live. I'm going to write a day by day account of our trip, so it's not one of THOSE extremely long posts.
DAY ONE aka 6/11/13:
Our day got started at the butt crack of dawn. The alarm was set for 3am and it didn't disappoint. We were able to infuse caffeine and we got our day started. There was a 6:30am flight to be caught and we didn't disappoint. The kids did awesome! I just let them sleep in the clothes that they wanted to wear the first day of our trip. And we got them up and headed out the door with breakfast in hand.
Our first stop landed in St. Louis. The flight was pretty uneventful. We quickly made our dash to the next gate to fly into Newark. As in Jersey.
On our second flight I was lucky enough to meet the flight attendant from h*ll. She griped at me after assuming that my phone was on. Have you ever had your phone in your hand and the screen lights up? That's what mine did. I'm sure if we had met under different circumstances we might have liked each other. But I'll never know. And I won't spend too much time dwelling on it.
But the fun was just beginning. After we got our luggage we learned all about how to get a cab. Someone told us to look for the yellow cabs. But where we came out of the airport, there were none to be found. We took what was there. Huge mistake. It didn't take long for Hubby to figure out we were getting fleeced. On the cabby's direction thing, he didn't choose the first and shortest route. He chose #3. Awesome. There seemed to be some hangup on the highway and we hit a miles long backup. The cabby chose to put his car in park every time we came to a pseudo-stop. That was just odd. And circles. That was another thing that was odd. And infuriating. Even in another state where I've never been things that we would pass were becoming familiar. Yeah.
We finally got to our hotel around 3:00. We hadn't eaten lunch yet either. Awesome. We couldn't decide what to do. Crash. Eat. Eat. Crash. After a lot of hemming and hawing we decided to find our way to Grimaldi's for a very late lunch or early dinner. After Hubby (off of his phone) showed the next cabby how to get there we finally went in.
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| Our hotel room was like a small apartment. The bathroom is right behind the kitchen. It's furnished completely by IKEA. I looked at the tags. |
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| The master bed is behind that half wall. It has skylights right above the bed. The skylights were great at night. Not so much in the morning. The kids slept on a pull out sofa. |
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| The windows by the bed were not real windows. That was just an odd part of the hotel room. |
Grimaldi's was highly recommended by people that we know. We were looking forward to it. It was over-hyped if you ask me. The pizza was good, but the customer service sucked. We waited for 10 minutes for someone to take our drink order. Hubby got tired of waiting and went to ask somebody if they could take our order. The kicker was that it wasn't even that busy inside.
After dinner we went to walk around the hood. That was the redeeming part of the day. We were in the section of town referred to as "Dumbo"**. It looks to be like an up and coming type of neighborhood. We walked along the East River. We were able to see the Statue of Liberty from a distance.
I stomached the East River Ferry to get back to the hotel. We walked past a grocery store to grab some items for our room and headed about 7 blocks to crash for the night.
Lessons learned from the day:
1. Tell the cabby to take the shortest, most direct route.
2. Stay in Manhattan. Everything you do is in Manhattan, so just fork out the money for a hotel in Manhattan.
*That and hotel beds just suck. They really do. I can't stand mushy beds. I am by some standards, old. And my body needs support. Surprisingly our hotel had a great bed.
**I once saw an episode of Selling New York that featured selling the penthouse apartment of the Dumbo building. Everything about it was exquisite! The views were amazeballs as well.
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