I’m back from a three night, way too quick trip to New York City. I’ve never been before, other than a couple of drive throughs on the way to family trips to DC. (I remember driving by Macy’s when I was twelve, and I remember my father pointing out the World Trade Center towers on a trip down in the late 90’s. That’s about it.)
So, I had another one of the weeks off I have over and above BF’s pitiful (in comparison to mine) time off schedule, and I decided I was going to actually do something this time. I found an inexpensive (for Manhattan) hotel – Hotel 17 – with shared bathrooms. Which turns out is the hotel my father and C use when they go down. And it was great. My room (a single) was tiny, but completely adequate for sleeping (which was all I really wanted to do in the room). I only ever once had to wait for a bathroom, and that was maybe ten minutes. It was also really conveniently located – about three blocks from Union Square. The metro station there connects into seven different lines – I only once had to do a connection to a line I couldn’t reach from there.
I ended up walking about 34 miles over the three days (and pretty much killing a pair of sneakers that were on their last legs anyway). I’m actually a little sore from it all, but in a good way. The funny thing is as much as I saw, I really only saw a very little bit of the city. It’s the kind of place where you could keep going back yearly for your entire life, and you wouldn’t see everything.
Since I was by myself, I decided to take it pretty easy on the food front – I didn’t really want to do fine dining by myself (it’s more fun if you have a person there to compare notes with), and it actually turned out I did a fair amount of convenience eating (a la – I’m doing a shopping crawl of Broadway between Soho and Union Square and realize I’m starving. Look – there’s a Pret a Manger. Let’s have a sandwich! Dinner is served!)
I did have the best Belgian waffles ever at Petite Abeille on 17th Street (the iced coffee was really good too), and the glass noodles at Republic were really good, as was the Elderberry Tonic I treated myself too. And, on my day in Brooklyn, I stopped at Almondine and had lunch, which I brought down to the Brooklyn Bridge Park. The location was fabulous, and the macaroons were to die for.
So it was a really good trip. I’ll probably have to do it again sometime, but I’m going to give my legs a bit of a rest first. I’ll post pictures of some of the places I went over the next couple of days.