NYC December 2008: Part 1

Back in December, I did a wild and crazy thing and I went to New York City in the middle of winter accompanied by some good friends of mine - Dona, Valerie, Lynn, and Mark. I realize that it's been months now, but I thought I'd share some of the pictures from our big adventures.

So here we go! (oh, just a warning...I was serious about the whole "blog when I feel like it" speech in the last blog, so it may take me months to blog this whole trip. But I can at least promise that each post will be as exciting as possible and well worth a read...)

Dona, Valerie and I arrived to NYC at about 11pm on Thursday night. Mark and Lynn decided to be cheap and took a red eye so they could avoid one night of paying for a hotel. Personally, I think that was insane, but I don't have the ability to fall asleep on command like they do. I would NEVER fall asleep on plane without some major help from a whole bottle of NyQuil and absolute quiet. Yeah, not going to happen on an airplane - at least the quiet part.

Valerie had friends in town since she lived in NYC for awhile, so she stayed with them. The rest of us - otherwise known as those with NO friends in NYC - got a fantastic deal at Hotel 17 which was on 3rd Avenue and 17th Street in Manhattan. It was under construction on the outside, but it was a charming historic hotel that had a fabulous old elevator that required you to manually open the door to let yourself out. Some might think that that it's one lazy elevator, but it was just like stepping back in time! I have no idea what time it was, but its back there.

I only wish I had a picture of that cute little elevator. It would have made for a better story...

Instead, here is a picture of Dona hanging out in our room. The hotel guy didn't have the appropriate room for us - which was just one double bed that Dona and I were going to share. But the luck of New York was with us and they had to upgrade us. It was great!

Unfortunately, Mark and Lynn were not as lucky in the room they got. They got what they paid for...they didn't end up sharing that double bed, though. Mark took the floor with his sleeping bag and mattress pad. (Boys are funny!)

This kind of hotel required you share four bathrooms with the rest of the guests staying on that floor. (That's why it was a great deal!) We did get our own little sink in our room which was very helpful and made it all worth while. The only problem we ran into was the inability of the water pipes to beat the odds against that ever powerful force of gravity. (Or was it lack of water? We aren't sure.) We were on the 8th floor and at 8am in the morning, we found that while taking a shower sometimes the water would just stop. If you were lucky, it would at least drip or even better give you a trickle to help you finish up. But sometimes, it just stopped all together (I would have thought we were in Egypt but when the water did come it was clear and not brown. So that was good!)

That was the only drawback! The hotel was just a few blocks away from Union Square subway station, so it made for running around the city very easy!

So with our great location, the next morning - after a full night's sleep and a semi-shower, we started on our adventure in the Big Apple....

Oh wait! We couldn't start out until Mark and Lynn arrived from the airport. They showed up at about 9am - refreshed and ready for a full day of activities - at least that's what they said. Once they found us and settled into their 4' by 10' room, THEN we started out on our adventure in the Big Apple...