NYC Trip Part One...

This is for you, Dad:

Atom's birthday present to me was trip to New York City with Lis to visit our dear friend, Abby. This is why I really like him. It was our first time apart since we got married, and it was so hard to leave! We sat on the couch before going to the airport and both of us cried like I was going away for a year. Do you think our children will be dramatic at all? Luckily, I was only going away for three days and four nights (counting the red-eye flight), and so we put on a brave face and if you'd seen us part at the airport, you would have thought we were old hats at the whole saying goodbye thing. So, the trip begins....

with a torturous flight that left at midnight, Salt Lake time, and was due to arrive at JFK at 6:15 AM. I am not one of those people who can sleep on an airplane. I think I might have dozed off for a good 7 minutes, and that was about it. We arrived at JFK on-time. Our bags were miraculously the first ones out at the baggage claim and before we knew it, we were in a cab on the way to Abby's apartment. I fell in love with her neighborhood in Greenwich Village with all of its old buildings:


After we crashed for a couple of hours, Lis and I got ready to meet Abby for lunch in the financial district. Abby left us very detailed instructions regarding how to get to the subway and which lines to take. One thing we neglected to take into to consideration: the lines travel both ways. We knew we should be heading downtown, but we neglected to check which train we were getting on and ended up on the upper west side instead if downtown. It took about another half hour to remedy that mistake but eventually we made it. We walked along Wall Street and saw about a million people taking pictures by the stock exchange, and some fun old ships along the water front, but we didn't linger too long. We had decided to go to see the art collection at the Frick mansion. It's a smaller art museum, but with a very eclectic collection. First, we had to get there. It took about an hour longer than planned, and a brief foray into Harlem, but eventually we made it. (We didn't tell Abby about our trip to Harlem - too embarrassed.) The museum was amazing! I partcularly enjoyed the Whistler paintings in the last room that we walked through. Here's one of my favorites:

I finally mastered the subway map on the way back downtown (no small feat in my mind), and we made it to the apartment with no problems. We went to dinner at a Spanish restaurant where they only serve tapas, or appetizers. We tried about a dozen different tapas ranging from grilled quail to pork empanadas. It was fantastic, and after we rolled ourselves home, we promptly hit the sack. Stay tuned (if you care) for Day Two...