Remembering.... our trip to NYC

Since I appear to have blog amnesia, I'm hoping to fire off a few recap blogs that can show what we've been up at our house this spring:

Dave and I took our first vacation, okay 3 day trip, without the kids. Yes, we were only 2 1/2 hours away from Dave's family and thus, our kids....but it provided the break we craved. I think we might be only people on the planet to go to the City that never sleeps for some respite. We seem get down to the City at least once a year, so we really just did a lot of walking and looking around. We know people there, but we were careful to only schedule a few visits in our schedule and we were lucky enough to see all five people in one day. (If you are reading this and we didn't see you, we'll see you next year.)

We discovered soul food at Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem where we met my HSU friend Julie and ate fried chicken and waffles. Luckily we arrived just before a busload of Dutch tourists. Julie and her husband are about to enrich the lives of people in Central Arkansas, and we wish them well.

We met up with Dave's HWS classmates, but we don't have the pictures to prove it. In order to round out the alum visit, we also met up with SU classmate Ross at his workplace...which had a very large newsroom. We met his reporter and I discovered it doesn't matter the overall size of the newsroom, the cubicles are still the same size.

Someone's sleepy....

I also found out it was my sorority's philanthropy day....World Autism Awareness Day...so I twisted Dave's arm to get up super early and then meet up with some alumnae from around the country at the Today Show. Dave was obviously separated from the herd, but in the meantime he got a picture with Meredith Viera. As we walked through Rockefeller Center, a woman stopped Dave and asked if he was on television in Minnesota. Yep, that's almost as good as when he was discovered on a hiking trail on the North Shore.

Later that day, we walked around the Central Park and Columbia Circle. We took a brief pedi-cab ride because we were so darn tired of walking. Our cab driver gave us a pseudo-tour on which he would stop peddling, point at something remarkable and say something like "Strawberry Fields. John Lennon. Go home. Googles it." This got to be quite amusing, so we spent the rest of our trip pointing at things and saying, "Empire State Building. Go home. Googles it."

We stayed at On The Ave on the Upper West Side and it was a great place to stay and be away from the bustle of Times Square, although we did walk through the Square there once. We stopped at Zabars and the Magnolia Bakery. (twice)

We ate at the best Cuban restaurant ever....Calle Ocho...actually, they might've just had the best mojitos and sangria ever. And, it was Mojito Monday, after all. Googles it.

Looking back, we went to bed early every day and got up early and spent time talking about our kids quite a bit... I won't say we were absolutely ready to jump back into the mix of interrupted sleep and poopy diapers....but those kids really were adorable when we got back.