I Left my Heart in...

It was, once again, a lovely 2 days in NYC. And I'm still hopelessly in love with the city, however after having one day of gorgeous weather, and one day of dreadful weather, I'm willing to admit, New York is much easier to take when it's nice out than in the rain.  A whole cavalcade of things that you don't worry about when you have a car comes into play - broken umbrellas, cold, no coats, wind blowing in the face, cars splashing puddles at you.  It's a whole thing. But I digress, all in all it was wonderful!

I'm not sure I converted my travel companion, but she was willing to admit she liked the city and enjoyed all the city-ish things like the subway, seeing shows, people everywhere. Though she's still a bit skeptical of all the walking.  Meanwhile, after having some Subway issues that had nothing to do with me having no sense of direction and everything to do with the stupid Subway token machines, I'm even more happy to walk to everything from now on. It's just so much easier and less stressful!

While I'm sort of (by no means completely) an expert at getting around Manhattan, I was pretty confident that we'd be ok.  And we were. (We didn't get lost once even with signal failure delays and having to change trains - yay us!) We took the Subway from Grand Central, which was a first for me and just as gorgeous as everyone says it is, grabbed a boat over to Liberty Island, which since it was positively beautiful outside was a real treat, saw a show (Matilda is just a bit darker than I thought it would be...), ate NY pizza and capped it off with Ice Cream in our fabulous hotel.  All in all, a pretty jam packed first day.  

Cut to Wednesday.  We had a great breakfast at Pigalle, then had breakfast-dessert at Levain, stood in line for #Ham4Ham (and failed to win tickets.) This is where it all sort of went downhill - the rains came...and came and came. Suddenly the plan to explore Central Park went out the window.  What exactly do you do in NY when you have no desire to trudge around in the rain getting even more soaked than you already are?  You see another show - Hello Something Rotten! again - such a great time filler. Thankfully after the show it had stopped raining  and we could get ourselves uptown to Serendipity for some frozen hot chocolate and dinner. Then it was back downtown for our luggage and quick cab ride to our bus - which were both on time even though the President was in town.

So, what did we learn on our trip?  A few lessons that will come in handy, that's for sure:
~ The Subway assumes if you use your credit card for more than one single fare card in a 24 hour period, you must have stolen that credit card and it will not allow you to use your card in the machine again for 24 hours.  Also, the machines don't take cash.  Both of these facts, add up to mucho frustration.
~ New York in the rain, while still magical, is a bear to navigate.  Think of the million people you pass at any given time in a city, now give every one of those people a soggy umbrella.  Yep.  The only thing to do in the rain is get thee to somewhere warm and dry preferably in a quick manner.
~ The ferry terminal to Liberty Island has better security than some small airports I've been to.
~ And last but not least, getting to see the city from the eyes of a newbie is just as exciting as I thought it would be! And since there's so much more to explore, surely she's going to have to come back again so we can take another crack at it!

* These are a few of my fave shots from my camera, because I haven't gotten around to editing my phone shots yet.  Hope to have them up this weekend - if for no other reason than I can't wait to scrapbook them :)