When our friends, the Spicers, invited us to come along on a trip to New York, things just kinda seemed to fall into place and we decided to make a four day weekend mini-vacation out of it!
So, on a Thursday morning, we dropped the dog at camp, picked up the Spicers, and headed for The Big Apple!! After some tense negotiations with Julie, our cruise director (actually the GPS system in Shawn’s car), we found our way to the Skyline Hotel. (Highly recommended, by the way. Not fancy, but a great location and very reasonable rates. Great for families!)
We dropped our bags and headed out for a walk and some food. We scouted Rockefeller Center for the following morning and then checked out Times Square. The boys were a bit awestruck but quickly fell into the New York groove!
After a pub-like dinner, we were off to Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built, for one of the last 25 regular season games ever to be played there! We were thrilled that the Yankees lost (but kept our mouths shut).
The next morning, we were up at the crack of dawn and off to the Today Show studios. The Spicers had won four VIP passes for a Today Show concert through their participation in the Relay for Life and had invited us to be their guests!! We quickly accepted and that’s what started this whole trip! Little did we know we’d be standing feet from the stage and watching with them as fans were interviewed (see John in the background at 0:33, 0:48), Sheryl Crow was interviewed and performed, and she performed again on the show (spot us at 3:01 and our sign on the right at 3:22)! And performed again (see our sign at 1:01, Shawn at 1:07, and John at 2:01)! You’ll see us several other times too if you watch close!
It was an awesome show! Sheryl Crow is hawt and we had a great time watching the whole process that creates the show! We can’t thank our friends enough for inviting us along!!
From there, we retrieved the kids who’d been watching back at the hotel and headed out for a day of sightseeing! After watching Thanksgiving Parades for years with mom, the boys were thrilled to see Macy’s:
And then we were off to and up the Empire State Building where we spent a really long time waiting in lines but felt it well worth it for the guys to see the city from the top!
Next, Jake, the train fanatic, had to see Grand Central Terminal! So, of course we did that!
After a brief swim in the pool at our hotel, our next stop was the Circle Line for a boat tour including views of the Statue of Liberty! We had a blast!
Not yet satisfied that we’d seen enough, we changed clothes and headed out again! Strolling into the Broadway theater district, we found Victor’s Cafe for a nice Cuban dinner! The boys loved the plantains!
And then, we were off just a few doors down the street to the Neil Simon Theater for the production of Hairspray! We enjoyed seeing Norm (George Wendt) in a dress, laughed at the ushers, chatted with some of the many Europeans we found visiting New York, and generally enjoyed the show!
Exhausted, our day was finally done.
But we were up and ready to go the next morning! After John enjoyed a run up to and around Central Park, we packed the car and drove north to Croton for Shawn’s 30th high school reunion! (Full details here!) We enjoyed a fun family picnic and then a more formal evening dinner and dance with a bunch of Shawn’s great friends!
We even drove by Shawn’s schools and her old house!! It’s been remodeled and doesn’t look like it used to - but it was still a trip down memory lane for her!
The next morning, we had a nice breakfast with Shawn’s high school chum Ellen and her husband, Mark. It was great catching up with them before heading home!!
All in all, it was a fun, tiring, whirlwind tour that was an absolute blast!! Let’s go again!
Awesome report for an even more awesome weekend. And to think it all started off on the right foot with a Yankee loss. It seriously sounds like a family trip you’ll talk about for decades. And I agree: SC is HOT!