The Final Day...a Summation

Okay, so it’s been weeks, and I still haven’t finished my vacation update. Here’s the final day:

Monday:

We got to NYC and took a cab to Michael and Maartje’s apartment complex. We didn’t want to carry our luggage around all day, so they said we could leave it with their doorman and he’d take care of it for us. I was a little nervous about it, but the other option was dragging our luggage through the city for ten hours, so we left it there and went to the Empire State Building. After about two hours in one line after the other, we finally made our way to the top. It is an interesting view (especially considering you’re 86 stories in the air). I took lots of pictures and marveled at how a city teeming with so many people and buildings could manage to stay afloat; it is an island, after all. J

We took quite a few pictures and then headed back down and proceeded to walk up 5th avenue…we went to St. Patrick’s Church and Rockefeller Center, stopping to look at a really amazing piece of art…walking to the sky…I loved it. I took a couple pictures, but it didn’t seem to justify it at all. I’ll see if I can find a good link on-line somewhere for it…and then to Trump Tower and the red-marble bathrooms (probably the nicest public restrooms in all of Manhattan…at least the kind where you don’t have to buy anything to use them). And then up near Central Park. Today was spent mostly just walking around the city, around a few blocks, and taking pictures and enjoying the view. We bought souvenirs and shopped and watched people.

We stopped to eat at the “Brooklyn Diner” a fun little place in the middle of Manhattan. Our waitress actually ended up being from Columbus, Indiana of all places. While sitting there reading all the names of the famous people who had dined there, we saw a Verizon truck get towed and the tow-truck do a U-Turn in the middle of the street. J

After that, we headed down to the Studio where Letterman is filmed and took pictures of the Hello Deli since it was closed. Standing around outside, we got to see Howard Dean leaving the show. After that, it was a few last looks around the city, back into a cab to get our luggage and back out to the airport. All in all, we could have spent another hour or so in the city, but we didn’t know with traffic and stuff like that how long it would really take for us to get to the apartment, through the city, to the airport, through security, etc. Better to be safe than sorry, right?

It was a great trip, a lot of fun, and I’m glad we went. Since then, I have been hard at work catching up on life—vacations should come a lot more often…