Thursday was the day for stereotypical New York touristy things. First, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn and back, stopping at Brooklyn Bridge Park for a bit:

We then hopped on the Staten Island Ferry for a ride to the island and back. It was a pretty windy and cold day, so standing on the deck to see the views wasn’t all that enjoyable, but I did it anyway:

Chelsea was a neighborhood we hadn’t spent too much time in up to that point, so we walked around there for a bit, stopping (of course) at Chelsea Hotel, as well as a burger place for lunch. We moved north to Columbus Circle and got some chocolate at the Godiva store before heading back to the hotel to freshen up a bit. For dinner, we went to a very lovely seafood place in the Village, then to the Brass Monkey bar in the meatpacking district. We didn’t stay too late, however, as we had to be up early on Friday.

Early Friday morning (5 AM early, to be exact), we got up so we could check out and be to Penn Station for our 7:10 train to lovely Wilmington, Delaware. It was a lot easier than I expected to grab a cab in Chinatown at 6 AM, and before long we were heading out of New York through the industrial landscape that is New Jersey. Just a couple hours later we were in Delaware, where Mo picked us up on his way to DC. Traffic wasn’t too terrible midday on Friday, and by around 1 P.M. we were in DC ready for the last part of our trip…which you can read about tomorrow.

It was pretty late when we arrived, so we didn’t go out on the town, but instead wandered around Chinatown and Little Italy and grabbed a late dinner at an Italian restaurant before heading back to the hotel and turning in for the night.

The next day, Monday, we started off by taking a trip down to City Hall park, and then Battery Park to see the sights, such as the Woolworth Building:

From there we headed uptown, first to Bryant Park to relax for a bit, then to check a bit of the shopping on Fifth Avenue. When we got tired of seeing things we couldn’t afford, we paid a visit to the Rockefeller Center, where the line to get to the top is far shorter than the Empire State Building, and the view is nicer:

Sadly, we couldn’t go to the 70th floor of the Rockefeller Center, the very top, as it was taken over by a film crew shooting a movie starring Matt Damon and involving a motorcycle somehow. We did, however, choose to take the historical art tour of the Rockefeller Center, and as Julia and I were the only people on the tour, it was a very personal experience. We also learned that most tourists are pretty ignorant: our tour guide said that we were the first people to have any idea who Diego Rivera was. Pathetic.

Afterwards, we headed to Williamsburg to meet Julia’s friend Quinn who is living in Brooklyn. We jumped on the L and went under the East River to grab dinner at your typical hipster restaurant, which did have pretty good food I do have to admit. And that was it for Monday.

Tuesday morning we started out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We spent the entire morning there, and saw maybe about a quarter of it, and much less of that in any detail. It’s a place you can spend a week at no problem. I’ve been there twice now, and there are still huge collections I have never seen.

We were temporarily stymied by a gyro mishap, but soon we disappeared behind the Met to check out Central Park. We wandered around for a few hours, and saw the typical touristy things like the Bow Bridge and Strawberry Fields. We exited the other end of the park onto the Upper West Side, where Julia got a manicure and we stopped and ate cupcakes from Crumbs.

Tuesday night, we hopped around SoHo, going to McSorley’s because it’s old (where we found a tiny bar kitten that looked a lot like Sasha), then to a couple more bars until we ended up at the Blind Tiger in Greenwich Village, which had more than one recommendation from people I know. They were right, and it was an excellent place.

All of that barhopping, which we are entirely too old for, wore us out, so we headed back to the hotel and went to sleep so we could shop on Wednesday, which will be in the next installment. Stay tuned!

• Current Mood: Monday headache
• Currently Listening To: "New York State of Mind", Billy Joel