For her 30th birthday, I took my wife to New York. Actually, it was New York and New Jersey. More specifically, Atlantic City. OK, I took her to see a show. OK, it was the America’s Got Talent live show.
I’m not sure why I feel a little embarrassed by admitting it, but I really like the television show and I really enjoyed the live show. Susie also like the show so I sought out the closest venue for the traveling road show and planned a trip around it.
I had never been to New York so I had no idea how much time we would want to spend at any given place. In retrospect, we crammed way too much into 3 days, but it was a whirlwind of fun!
We flew with Porter out of the island airport into Newark on the early flight on a Friday morning. The flight was awesome. Porter really is Flying Refined. On arrival at Newark we had to get downtown so we opted to grab a taxi. With the fare and tolls all in it worked out to $88, but traffic was fine and we got downtown in no time.
We headed straight for the Michaelangelo hotel at 51st and 7th Ave. I had done all of the planning for the trip so I was glad to see that the hotel was awesome. In all honesty, I chose the place based on location, but it was a nice surprise to see that it was a really nice hotel. We were way too early to check in, but the concierge suggested a relatively inexpensive room upgrade to a suite and we had our home base set.
The first thing that we did was figure out what to do for dinner. We opened the magazine in the living room and saw an ad for Nobu57 so we called and found out that the only dinner reservation options that we could get were for 6:30pm or 10:30pm. We figured that, since we aren’t quite retired yet, we should hit up the late dinner.
I told Susie about the trip kind of at the last minute, but she still had time to research a few things that she wanted to do while in Manhattan. We headed out on our first mission … trying to find a Sound Machine. We found our way from the hotel through Times Square and headed south.
Times Square blew my mind. I always thought it would be busy, but I had no idea how overwhelming it would feel. We wandered around with Susie leading and me trailing along staring up from billboard to billboard. The only thing that I found more overwhelming in the whole trip was watching New Yorkers jump off of curbs in front of cabs.
We did some shopping throughout the first day as we wove ourself through the streets towards 3rd Ave and East 60th St where we stopped at Serendipity3 for lunch. We wanted to go there after seeing Serendipity to prep for the trip. This place had the most ridiculous portions. They had tent cards on the table for a $75 foot long hot dog and a $1,000 sundae. We didn’t see anyone order either of those items … I guess people don’t realize that you have to order either 24 hours or 72 hours in advance.
We watched people keep ordering these massive chilled hot chocolates and huge sundaes so we decided to share a sundae. Since we had already eaten lunch we asked the waiter to make us something not on the menu. The waiter couldn’t understand that we only wanted a “single-scoop” sundae, but he caved with a profession of how full we were.
After lunch, we had a master plan to hit the Apple Store on 5th, then a quick walk through Central Park before returning to the hotel. A quick Google search showed us that there was a lot of shopping on our way back to the hotel and we got seriously sidetracked. We didn’t end up making it to either of the planned stops and, by the time we got back to the suite, it was already well after 7:00pm and we were exhausted. We figured that during the day we walked about 15km as the crow flies and almost 20km with all of the turns and shopping stops.
After some chillout time in the room, I took Susie to Nobu a little early, figuring that we could grab a drink at the bar. They seated us a few minutes early and got us started with our dinner. I opted to go for the seven course tasting menu which was the best single meal I have had in my life!
After dinner, we had a tough time finding a cab and, with the shoes Susie had chosen to wear that night, walking was not an option despite only being a few blocks away from the hotel.
When a yellow cab finally stopped for us, the guy rolled down the window and asked where we were headed. When he found out it was only a couple of blocks he took off without even saying anything to us.
A moment later another guy rolled down his window and asked the same question. This time he told us to hop in. Moments later I realized that this was the nicest “cab” I’d ever seen. In fact, it was a Cadillac Escalade. On further inspection, we noticed that there wasn’t actually a meter.
It ended up being a quick and awesome ride but it wasn’t lost on us that it was a risky decision to jump into an unlicensed taxi. As soon as we got into the hotel, I turned to Susie to discuss and she cut me off with “I know, I really don’t want to think about it”.
In the morning, we headed up to Mt Vernon to see some of Susie’s family. I didn’t actually give them any notice but they pulled together a great brunch spread, complete with a birthday cake and gifts for Susie’s birthday.
After brunch, we headed towards Atlantic city. I guess we brunched a little too long because it turned out that we were in a rush to get to the hotel so that we didn’t miss the beginning of the show.
Down to the wire, we had to skip dinner to make sure that we were at the show in time.
The show was awesome. Most of the top ten acts were there, including my favorite: fighting gravity. http://www.fightingravity.com/. The only low point in the show was the ignorance of one of my fellow audience members. This particular woman seemed to go out of her way to ruin the best act of the evening.
Fighting Gravity is a very unique show that requires complete darkness to get the full effect. Jerry Springer was hosting and he went out of his way to ask the audience to not take pictures and put away all video cameras so that everyone could enjoy the show. This knob assumed that he wasn’t talking to her and held her video camera above her head. She was directly in my line of sight for the stage so I went up to her and asked her to put the camera down.
As soon as I get back to my seat, this idiot has the camera up again so I went back and put my hand in front of her stupid camera. I made it clear that I would take the thing if she put it back up again and she hid it from that point forward, although she never stopped recording. Here is a video shot by someone else that was screwing up the show for somebody:
After the show we needed to find some food but, since we were in a casino, we decided to play a few games first. First, we found a slot machine that had the same number as Susie’s birthday and won $250 on the second pull. Then we played some blackjack and won another couple hundred. The idea was to go to the fine dining place if we won, or the casual place if we lost.
Since we were up, we checked out the nicer place, but went for the casual place after all because the food looked better. Ten minutes into dinner, Jerry Springer and his crew walked in so I guess we made the better choice!
After dinner, Susie watched as I dropped several hundred bucks playing craps, but the blackjack sprites were on our side and we finished the night up just over $500.
It wasn’t until morning that we realized our room was much better than we thought. The room itself was a little blah compared to my expectations. Given we were staying at the Trump Taj Mahal I figured it would be much nicer inside the room. When the sun came up we were treated to an unbelievable view, overlooking the boardwalk.
We decided that our last day in NYC should be spent tracking down and eating some of the quintessential New York foods. We shared everything so that we could make the best time possible without filling up our bellies too much. We made an early call that we would drop off our rental car at the airport so we were stuck trying to park in Manhattan on a Sunday. Incredibly, we found a free street spot at W54 & Broadway so we had our home base.
Our first food was a double stop. We got both a slice of pizza and a cupcake to kick things off. On the way to Central Park we grabbed a warm pretzel as well. After our fall picnic I dragged Susie along to find a geocache in the park where I was finally able to drop a geocoin that I had been carrying around for way too long.
Next stop was more street food in the form of dumplings and a Turkish taco. Definitely not what we expected, but both were very good. We dropped by 30 Rockafeller Plaza to see people skating, but we figured we would save going to the top for another visit.
On the way back to the car we saw a sign for a place called Oyster Bar so we stopped in for one of their famous shots. It was a vodka-based shot with tomato juice, salt, pepper, celery salt, and a freshly shucked oyster. It was a big shot, but man was it good!
Overall the weekend was awesome. We decided even before leaving that we needed to come back soon. There were so many things that we didn’t get to that you need to see or do in NYC. No Empire State building, no Statue of Liberty, no Apple Store on 5th Ave, no Soho, no Wall Street, no Grenwich Village, and barely even a glance of Central Park.
New York … We’ll be back soon!
