NEW YORK CITY!

Warning: the following several posts are not for the faint of heart. They will be detailed and picture overloaded simply because this is my record of our trip. Feel free to skim.
Disclaimer: we did not bring a camera, so all the pictures are from our phones. You can tell the ones from Ian's brand new iphone because they are clearer than ones from my phone.

We just got back from our trip to NYC. We had an absolute blast. It was so fun to just be together in the city without the kids and get to feel like kids again ourselves. We haven't ever left the kids for this long, so it was both exciting and a tiny bit sad. This post will be all about our first 24 hours of vacation. We took the red-eye on Friday night. It really wasn't as miserable as I had imagined it would be. We were very tired and didn't sleep more than a couple hours, but the flight went pretty quick and I watched "Catch Me If You Can" on the plane.

We arrived at about 6am NY time and grabbed a cab into the city. The driver was seriously crazy. He drove so fast and nutty. I was somewhat grateful for this since I was really looking forward to a bed. Here we are happy to have arrived. (There was no way this picture was going to come out clear with the way that man was driving)
We checked into our hotel and promptly crashed in the bed for about 3ish hours. It was great. We got going at 11am. The hotel had a really cool bank of glass elevators that went around this cylinder so that they were on the outside. This is me all fresh, somewhat rested, and showered in the glass elevator. (Ian enjoyed pretending to be Superman on the way up . . . when we were alone)
First thing we did was head straight for the Wicked lottery near our hotel. We didn't win. Bummer. Here's Ian just outside the lottery.
We trekked a bit to have lunch at Gray's Papaya. Definitely better hot dogs than your average street cart. Cheaper too. Mmm. (I have a weird look on my face because Ian was taking forever to get the picture)
Oh, also it was raining . . . hard. All morning. It was kind of annoying. We decided to do one of the things we never got around to when we lived there. We went to the American Museum of Natural History. It is a "suggested donation" so opted to pay $5 each and spend an hour or so there. It was really much cooler than we thought. This is the main entrance atrium with some dinosaur bones.
We took a sitting/bathroom break and had fun playing with the camera.
In the Hall of Marine Life there were all these individual display windows of different animals (not alive). These were the sea turtles. We thought Weston would want to see them. It was pretty dark in there though, so it was hard to get a good picture with the phone camera.
After wandering the museum and stumbling on a few really cool exhibits we exited into this really cool tunnel.
It was still raining, so we skipped the park and instead planned on going to the giant Borders at Union Square. Well we took the subway down there and discovered the Borders wasn't there anymore. There was a farmer's market going on though, so we wandered through that and checked in with the kids, then we shopped a bit. Finally it was time to find a place to eat. We ended up eating right in Union Square at the Heartland Brewery. It was pretty yum and we were starving. We hopped the subway back up to midtown and hit the evening show Wicked lottery, but again didn't win. :(

It was really OK since we had tickets to go see an improv comedy show at the Upright Citizens Brigade. It was a pretty cool old theater put together with ancient, poky-springed theater seats. The comedy was funny too and fairly clean (for NY). It was a short, fun show.
It had finally stopped raining, so we decided to wander Times Square a little bit on our way back to the hotel. As usual Times Square was packed, but the cool thing was that the city had blocked off a couple sections of street and just put out a bunch of lawn chairs for people to just sit in and people watch or whatever. It was random and fun.
We were pretty tired, so we ended the night with some yummy take-out chocolate caramel cakes from Junior's Bakery. Our hotel room was pretty tiny, in keeping with every space in Manhattan, but we had a king size bed that was incredibly comfy, a big TV, and light blocking curtains. I slept like a baby.

More to come on Day 2 of our big city vacation.