Manhattan Weekend TR
Lots of great photos from the trip can be found in the gallery!
Mark and I bought the tickets, and last weekend we found ourselves boarding an airplane for New York City. It was good to get some time in back in the stratosphere, because the last time Mark and I flew, it was a really rough ride, with a long scary, rolling, and eventually aborted landing into the airport. It was nice to remember that most flights in big planes are no big deal. Especially since we are due for eight hours in the air on the way to Kauai in just over a week.
We arrived in Manhattan at around 10pm their time Friday night. I remembered the wrong address for the hotel, and we ended up having the cab drop us off with all of our luggage on a random corner of Broadway. The first adventure of the weekend was wandering through Times Square with our luggage over our shoulders on a Friday Night!
We found the hotel after only a few blocks of walking. We were staying at the Amsterdam Court Hotel, which is a smaller, older building, with a great atmosphere. The elevator was tiny, and moved slowly and jerkily as if it had been retrofitted with the auto-driver. The main staircase had marble stairs with deep, smooth grooves worn into them as people had been walking up and down these for 200 years. Our room was tiny, but decorated in a simple, modern style that I really liked.
Saturday morning we got up late, and headed out to see some city sights before we were due for our dinner reservations. We checked out the classic spots in mid-town, Rockefeller center, shopping on Fifth Ave, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, FAO Schwartz, and even a bit of Central Park.
Saturday evening was the big event. Beginning with dinner at Sardi’s at 6:30p. The menu was adventurous and delicious. I had fois gras for the first time, and I decided it really does taste like tortured-goose liver. I didn’t eat much of it. The show started at 8p, and we made it without much issue. Watching Les Miserables for the first time, I realized that there were a lot of adult jokes and snipes that I never got from just listening to the CDs. I enjoyed it; Mark felt the second act was pretty slow.
On Sunday, we hopped on the subway and headed up to the American Museum of Natural History. This was a cool place, but we ended up in many of the “animals of [insert part of North America here]” exhibits. These were interesting, but Mark and I have actually visited many of these places and seen these animals. It was weird walking through exhibits describing all of the wonders of the Rocky Mountains, when we would be heading back there in a few hours.
I did really enjoy all of the fossils and skeletons on the top floor. I had no idea that animals like these actually existed! There were tortoises bigger than me, moose-like animals with racks of antlers so huge it looked like they couldn’t hold their heads up, and giant scary fish with huge teeth and claws on their feet/fins!
That evening we made it to our gate at the airport a full three hours before our flight left, and there was another plane to Denver getting ready to take off. The awesome United guy managed to get our luggage moved over and let us take the earlier flight home. What a great weekend and an excellent adventure!
