Celeste's Creations: Pantless and Hobbles Take on New York! Part 1

Ok, obviously I haven't been keeping up with my New Year's resolution of updating my blog at least monthly (or let's be honest, many of the other goals I set). And it's not from lack of stuff to post. Just plain laziness on my part. Blogs take a long to update, especially when you haven't been on it for 6 months....
With that said I have been posting my life on Facebook, but I know not everyone is one it (Fonda, Rhonda and Dad I'm talking to you). So I figured I would update my blog with all the fun and adventures I had recently vacationing with my best friend Lisa in New York City.
I took over 900+ photos (not even counting some of the crazy fun ones Lisa took too) and finally narrowed them down to my favorites (a manageable 100). I've posted those on Facebook. But since a lot of your are busy people and didn't have time to follow along with us on our vacation I will try to highlight the trip in several posts. I think one long post for a week in New York would just bore you all and even I would lose interest in typing. So instead I'll try to break it down into sections (combining a few days into one post). That way you can read at your leisure (or attention span) and I can post more photos overall. I'll also throw in some helpful hints that we could have benefited from knowing a head of time.
Let's start at the beginning.... Last year maybe around Sept, October or November, Lisa called me up and said she wanted to go to New York and had gotten a credit card that offered her miles and she was going to turn them in for our flights to New York. Poor Lisa hasn't been on a true vacation since our last trip together to Paris in 2004. So obviously she was well overdue. I've always wanted to see New York and even thought I would spend my 40th birthday there, but with knee surgery in Aug and finances not allowing that to happen, I was more than happy to join her on our next crazy adventure (our Paris trip was dubbed the adventures of Crazy Hair and Sexy Body by a cartoonist outside of the Louvre). We both agreed that we were no longer the same crazy, sexy kids we were then and would have to come up with a new theme to our trip (Pantless and Hobbles quickly became our theme, as Lisa took her pants off whenever we were in the hotel and I of course had nothing but aching feet the whole trip due to not wearing in broken in shoes- no blisters, just sore and aching muscles every time I moved. Surprising, my knee didn't hurt me, just swelled up around Wed).
May 13, 2012
Our flight left Sacramento on Sunday, May 13th (Mother's Day) at 7am. Great start to the day for my mom to drop us off at 6am. Luckily I slept the majority of the flight to Washington Dulles airport (5 1/2 hrs). We wandered the airport looking for something to eat, as we didn't even get pretzels or nuts on the whole flight (Thank you United for your service). After a 3hr layover we boarded our flight to New York. It was one of the smaller planes you have to board on the tarmac. We landed in New York after 6pm. Went to baggage claim. We made note of a sign for an airporter $12 one way to Penn Station which was across from our hotel. After frantically searching our carry on for the luggage tags as we noticed you have to show them to get out of the baggage claim with your bags. Luckily we found them as our bags did NOT arrive with us on the plane. I went into the lost baggage office and was quickly told to fill out the paperwork along with several other people arguing about their lost luggage from our flight. I gave the woman at the counter the paper and she quickly dismissed me saying I'm done. Humm, no how about where are our bags and when can we expect them. Now I'm sure this is the worst job you can have at an airline, but you need to also realize you have just lost people's luggage with valuables instead and not just dismiss them like it's their fault. Luckily Lisa is pushy enough to get more answers out of her, which really was just call the 1-800 after the 11pm flight from Washington comes in. (Thank you again United for your service)
We went to the airporter ( http://www.nyairportservice.com/ ) and waited for the woman in front of us bitch and complain that she can't wait for the next bus. We approached with smiles and a comment about the rude lady and they gave us a deal of $18 roundtrip to/from Penn Station to the airport and told us we'll be on the next bus. Much cheaper than a $60 one way taxi ride. Being nice pays off. While on the bus Lisa and I were super excited to see all the buildings come into view from the bus window and I had to turn and tell the guys behind us who obviously could tell we were tourist, that we live near SF, so big cities aren't new to us, We struck up a great conversation with them and they were so nice and helpful we ended up exiting the bus a stop early with them, as we didn't have our luggage to lug around (Thank you again United for your service) and could walk the 12 blocks to our hotel while seeing some sights. We arrived at our hotel (The New Yorker Hotel http://www.newyorkerhotel.com/) and checked in, telling them our sob story from the airline and to let us know if our luggage shows up. The front desk lady then decided to find us a room with a balcony (we had already been upgraded to a suite, thanks to Lisa's client who worked his contacts in New York). When we got to our room on the 22nd floor, the suite reminded me of an Embassy Suites room, with a separate living space from the bedrooms. But the balcony was, well more like a rooftop terrace with amazing views. Madison Square Garden was literally a stones throw away, Chrysler Building and Empire State Building were within walking distance. If you step up on some blocks and looked to your left you could see the Hudson River. It was AMAZING and perfect location!

Our hotel with Madison Square Garden right outside our door. Along with a Starbucks and subway station

I got the bed next to the window with views of Chrysler Building and Empire State Building

View from balcony, you can just see a sliver of the Empire State Building on the left upper side

View from balcony, Madison Square Garden and the Freedom Towers glittering in the far background

View from balcony, can't figure out what buildings these were with the lights towers, but they are near Times Square and would change color throughout the night

After taking pictures and ooohhh and awwwing from our room, we decided to head out and get some dinner. We didn't really consult a map and just started walking in one direction. After a few blocks of nothing but chain restaurants we found ourselves close to Times Square. We decided to grab some food at The Counter, somewhat of a build your own burger chain, but better than Olive Garden. We headed to Times Square afterwards and this is definitely something you stop and see for about five minutes and then move on. It had a very Vegas-like feel to it and was still super crowded at 11:30pm on a Sunday night. I'm not sure what the point of the stairs in the middle of Times Square, I guess people watching would be interesting. But really with the amount of chain stores, restaurants and nothing but advertisements, I don't see the big deal. But we checked it off our list of sights to see.

We are officially in New York

Lisa causing trouble already

Times Square, pick a Broadway show, any show! We ended up at Priscilla Queen of the Desert whose theater was right there in front of us!

May 14, 2012
Before we left my friend Shelly suggested we take a food tour, as she did it and loved it. They offer many different neighborhoods, but we decided to do the Greenwich Village one as it seemed best suited for Lisa who is a vegetarian and would require the less amount of substitutions. http://www.zerve.com/FoodTours The tour was a great start to our vacation as we walked around the neighborhood, sampling the food and learning the history and interesting facts. Our tour was lead by Barri and started off at Joe's Pizza. This is suppose to be the best pizza in New York and has a wall of photos from visiting celebrities and was in one of the Superman movies. The pizza was crisp and thin and just perfect amount of cheese and sauce. Not too greasy and flavorful. It was so good Lisa and I came back on Wednesday night back from downtown on the way back to the hotel, along with another stop at Milk and Cookies from the tour. The tour is 3 hours, but you really wouldn't notice as you are walking around a quaint neighborhood (reminds me of areas in Italy), eating great food and seeing some buildings you recognize in tv and movies. I planned it to be around lunchtime so we wouldn't have to worry about food before or afterwards which worked perfect. We went to O & Co. ( http://www.oliviersandco.com/ ) on the tour and Lisa and I came back after the tour ended and stayed about another hour tasting more combos of oil and buying whatever we tasted. Justin and Laura there were so nice and fun, they didn't even really get mad when we decided to split our order up, even though they had already rang it up together. Again being nice and having a good attitude got us far on this trip.

Tour group at Joe's Pizza

Little infamous Beatnik club below a restaurant in Greenwich Village

Lisa and I enjoying our tapas at Centro on Bleecker and 7th Ave

The best cookies!!! So good we came back for more a couple days later

Smallest apartment (75 1/2 Ave) in New York. Today show did a segment on this place

The exterior apartment on Friends

Greenwich Music School and typical street in the Village

Murray's Cheese

Rocco Pasticceria, where our tour ended with the best tasting cannoli

After the tour we headed back to the hotel for a rest. During the tour we asked our guide for a dinner recommendation near us as all we found before was chains. She had suggested ending out to Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. It's a small area near the Theater District, so you have a lot of up and coming chefs and restaurants in this area. We first exited the subway at 50th St to try to find the Ed Sullivan Theater as I wanted to get a photo and some merchandise from the David Letterman show. We found the theater pretty easy off 53rd St, but of course it was closed up for the evening and we wandered the block over and over and could not find Hello Deli where Rupert sells memorabilia, even though there was a map on the front of the theater where to go (we tried again later on in the week and finally realized we wouldn't have found the deli as it was on the wrong side and all closed with no real signage. The doorman next door said he is only open between 12-4 if we are lucky, he is doing so well he doesn't really need to be open more hours.

We headed over towards Hell's Kitchen in search of food. There was a lovely drunken woman in front of us with her friends that kept falling almost every other step and rolling in the gutter. Whenever her friends tried to help her walk she would push them off and then end up falling again. I bet she looked pretty the next morning. We ended up finding a tiny place to eat called Hummus Kitchen. These restaurants are so small we actually put our name in a different restaurant (Thai something) thinking it was all one space. But no they were two different places, only figuring this out when I noticed people walking into Hummus Kitchen and getting sat, while we were told in the other space 45min. Luckily Lisa went in and we got sat right away. The service was friendly and entertaining as we were right at the server station. The food ended up being really good (we shared hummus of course, Lisa had garden vegetable soup I had chicken kebab). The waiter told us next door (not the Thai place) was holding drag bingo. Got to love New York!
We decided since the Empire State Building was only a few blocks from our hotel we should hit it late at night to avoid the lines. The building is open until 2am, with the last elevator up around 1am. We headed towards it around 11:30pm. It was perfect, NO lines, minimal kids, and beautiful night views of the city. It was very windy on one side of the building, so a lot of my first attempts at photos were blurry. We didn't buy the map pointing out the sights, so I really didn't have much idea what was what in the dark, but decided to just take photos from each side and see what I get. We headed home after about an hour and called it a good first full day in New York!