I’m not sure when I was told that were going to New York for a long weekend, but I can assure you, Maria, my wife, didn’t think it was necessary to tell me. Okay, maybe she did ask me if my schedule was clear from Saturday February 10 until Tuesday February 13, but if she hadn’t I wouldn’t have been mad. She got the tickets on sale from Jet Blue. The bill for the two of us roundtrip O’Hare to JFK was less than two hundred bucks. Sorry Midwest! You have to know we won’t get that rate again and we may not have secured it if she had waited to consult with me.
After work on Friday, we traveled to Chicago and stayed with our long suffering friend Gail Cohen. This time the suffering included getting up at 4:00am to get us to the airport for our 6:00am CST flight. While this seems like a pain in the butt time to be leaving, it permitted us to arrive in New York at a really great time. We landed about 30 minutes ahead of schedule and after a quick cab ride through the light Saturday morning traffic we are checked in to our room at Milford Plaza by 10:30am EST.
We blew the biggest advantage by not getting into line at Hot Tickets for a matinee show at half price. But we did manage to meet up with our favorite New York travel friends the Nagler’s and their daughter, Ann, in time to get tickets for the evening performance. We get five seats to see “The Little Dog Laughed” at the Cort Theater. (I will blog on this separately.)
Helpful Hint: It’s a little known fact; there are two lines at the hot tickets booth in NY. One, the really, really, really long one, is for all of the shows. However, if you want to go to a drama there is a much shorter line. Now I realize an hour wait for half price ticket to see Lion King or one of the other perennial favorites is tempting, but remember they probably will send a road company version to a town near you. Some of the excellent theater productions that are available in New York are not a musical and not all good theater will win a Tony Award. Take my advice; check out the plays available in the short line.
The girls go off and bond doing whatever they do to bond. Lenny and I head for “the hole”, the New York Subway. If you travel to New York City, you’ve got to learn to use the Subway System. Cabs are very expensive. You sure as hell don’t want to drive your own car in New York City. If the cabs don’t kill you the parking fees will.
That evening we dine on Broadway on appetizers and our favorite beverage and than it was off to the theater. I will expound more on the performance of , “The Little Dog Laughed” in another blog, however a quote from Lenny as we left the theater pretty much sums it up.
“It’s wonderful when you start out a trip like this with a performance that will make you glad to came to New York no matter what you see the rest of the time you’re here” so sayth Len and I agree.
We ate breakfast Sunday morning at Junior’s which is a Brooklyn Family Restaurant Chain with great value and great food. After the wait in the line for matinee tickets to see “Spamalot”, we trudged down the street to Café Europa with Helen’s NY Times until we could gt our seats at the Schubert. The humor in “Spamalot” is slap stick as is all of the Monty Python stuff. We just let it roll over us and enjoyed it, rather than wonder what high brow stuff we might be missing. That evening we took the Subway to Astoria in Queens to have dinner with Aaron Nagler his wife Carolyn and their two kids Madeline and Violet.
Monday the merry band of travelers got to on their horse (the subway) and goto Chelsea. Known for its art galleries and it’s colorful residents, we were only disappointed in the fact that all of the galleries were closed on Monday. We had breakfast in a neat neighborhood place. Len and Helen went to the Met. We went to the Tenement Museum. This lower East Side attraction includes a history lecture and tour of a well preserved Tenement House circa the turn of the century. When we regrouped in the evening we had a sumptuous dinner at Robert Emmett’s on Eighth Avenue. We skipped the overpriced dessert’s at Emmett’s for a piece of cheese cake at, (where else?), Junior’s.
The trip home deserves a blog all to itself if only because we were on the cusp of a disaster, but didn’t know it. The short version is that on Valentines Day 2007 we flew one of the only planes out of New York to Chicago. Out flight hopped over a storm that the Midwest and particularly Jet Blue will not soon forget.
Our approximately two hour flight from New York’s JFK to Chicago’s O’Hare was followed by a automobile trip of three and one half hours from Chicago to Milwaukee in blinding snow, slippery roads and not a lot of company.
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