New York!!! Friday

“Some folks like to get away
Take a holiday from the neighbourhood
Hop a flight to Miami Beach
Or to Hollywood
But I'm taking a Greyhound
On the Hudson River Line
I'm in a New York state of mind
I've seen all the movie stars
In their fancy cars and their limousines
Been high in the Rockies under the evergreens
But I know what I'm needing
And I don't want to waste more time
I'm in a New York state of mind” – Billy Joel

We planned this trip for four months! Four months and then all the sudden it was here and none of us realized how hard it was going to be to get to our hotel. haha!
I flew in on the red-eye and got to the big city about 5:30am Friday morning. The next 2.5 hours were spent on the Long Island Rail Road, air trains, subway, and a taxi just to try and get to the SpringHill Marriott in Newark, NJ (pictured here…hahaha!) We were told Newark would be cheaper than NYC. True until you count in travel costs. And it took about an hour to get into the city even though we had been told it would only take about half that time. Oh well. Live and learn:
When I finally got to the hotel it was all I could do to not burst out in tears. It had cost me A LOT of money to come in from JFK…and A LOT of time. I was terrified that this was the way it would be every day. Not so though. -The man behind the desk must have seen the tears threatening to come because when I asked if I could leave my bags there even though check-in wasn’t until 3pm he said, “your room is actually ready now and you can just go up”. BEST. NEWS. EVER! I was exhausted and already felt grimy. So I went up, showered, made myself look pretty, and then laid down on the bed to wait for the sisters I thought for sure would show up any minute.
They didn’t.
Finally…4 hrs later around noon, they made it to the hotel. Apparently it had taken them longer than they thought too. That’s ok. We talked to the concierge and he told us the proper way to get to Manhattan from the hotel. Much faster and cheaper ;)
Anyway. After they got freshened up a little bit we were finally on our way…4 hrs later than we had originally planned. We hopped off the subway at NY Penn Station (right under Madison Square Gardens):

and this was the first thing I saw (minus the two sisters…):

That’s right- a BBQ place was my first glimpse of the big city! hahaha! We wanted to catch the last tour of the season at Carnegie Hall at 2pm, but we didn’t want to take the time to figure out the subway system, so we started hoofing it. Twenty-three blocks to be exact…all down Fashion District on 7th Ave. Here are some of the things we saw (check out those boots!):

But anyway…so almost 3 miles later we finally get to Carnegie Hall…step up to the desk to present our passes, and get told that “the final 2pm tour has been cancelled due to a rehearsal”. (crickets) We couldn’t get in to see anything! Oh well. Nothing was going to get my spirits down now that I was actually there, so we went to find some lunch. Some delicious café sandwiches and cheesecake.

This is when we had the first of many conferences…about what we wanted to do next. I said I wanted to stalk the White Collar crew…luckily for me Lyd was totally down with that and Sav didn’t mind either…so off we went!
This was our first spotting. None of the major actors were there at the moment so we asked a few questions and then left. New York University and Washington Square Park were near by so we went and took a gander. Loved it!

While we were lolling on some benches beneath some trees I took the time to notice the wildlife-heh heh.

I also noticed a handful of people…people with big, fancy cameras…big fancy cameras that had even bigger and fancier lenses. They were all looking in the direction of a tall, red-brick building. They couldn’t take their eyes off of it! I thought surely the only thing that could capture that much admiration and devotion would be if Spider Man himself were descending on a long silver thread…but since I couldn’t see Spider Man, and curiosity got the better of me, I decided to ask what in the world was happening. It was this:

Yep.  A red tailed hawk is what had these city-slickers all in a bind. I made some off-hand comment about how we have those everywhere where I came from-got a bunch of dirty looks- and then went back to my squirrel/dog/people watching.
Pretty soon it got to be the time where White Collar needed to be stalked again. We headed out of the park just in time to see a bunch of people pushing work carts filled with big cameras/mikes/ and odds and ends. We followed them and waited. We didn’t have to wait long. Pretty soon we saw Peter himself walking up the road followed by an escort of..security? I don’t know. He stopped though to take this picture and tweet it via instagram: You can barely see me behind the crew member...
Here’s some pics I took of him! And Matt when he showed up just a few minutes later!!! Just as good looking in real life! The one thing that would have made this trip perfect (for me) would have been to meet him personally…oh well. I got to see him :)

So, I won’t admit to how long we sat and gawked at them, but lets just say we had to eat and run (literally) to get to our next big event on time…Phantom on BROADWAY!!!! Here I must interject one more thing: I wish, I wish, I wish I had either bought more shows in advance, or that we would have been there during the week, because I could have spent MOST OF MY TIME THERE watching Broadway. We thought we’d be able to get discount tickets the days of the shows from the tsks (sp?) booths or from the theaters, but Broadway apparently gets sold out during the weekends in advance-at least to the shows we were interested in. So so sad! And yet another reason I must go back. But anyway- Phantom was awesome! So much better than previous ones I had watched. We had excellent seats also. Right now I want you to look at the picture lit up with the red curtain and the angel in the middle. During the Raul and Christine’s song “All I Ask of You” that angel moved forward…and then right after the song the phantom rose up from it and was standing on it high in the air singing and it gave me cold chills!!! The talent was just amazing!!! Ooh. Still gives me cold chills thinking about it…

We wandered around Times Square for a little bit after the show. It reminded me of being in Vegas on the strip at night- minus the dirty hooker handouts. It was bright and fun and energetic.
We didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight or so…and didn’t get to sleep until 1:3o or 2am…made the next day hard, but as I said above, NOTHING could get me down now that I was there! And on to Saturday…(but first a couple random pics of us on the Subway-dang straight we were the life of the party! Lyd has the best one. You’ll have to check her blog out for it):