Advertisement
Published: November 22nd 2016
Edit Blog Post
Touched down at Newark's Liberty International on Friday morning with "I Love New York City" by Andrew WK pinging in my head; hadn't been able to shake it the week leading up to our weekend getaway to the Big Apple...it had been more than fourteen years since I was here last and I couldn't wait to get back into the fray and see what had been going on in my absence...
I had been here three times before, all with my good mate Ken, and each time provided plenty of epic adventures and stories (with one or two still lore in NYC after all these years...haha...they will not be recounted here for the sake of time, and more importantly to protect the somewhat guilty...). And so it was Ken and I again and this time we were bringing the gals, gonna be good!
The genesis of the trip began back in the summer while hanging out with our mutual friend Peter (who is a very talented musician and resident of NYC)...he mentioned he was thinking of putting on a big show to celebrate his upcoming milestone b-day, and to this the light bulbs went off over all of our
Lady Liberty
...beautiful...and huge, check out the folks for scale around the base... heads followed by a rousing "let's go!"...okay! Show was confirmed, tickets purchased, full steam ahead...
Had some loose plans; the show itself was Sunday night, and we each had a thing or two to check out but nothing written in stone...turns out we caught up on some sites missed in previous trips: Central Park for the Lovely K, Empire State Building for K and I, Brooklyn Bridge for all of us among some of the stops...another option none of us had done was a boat trip; took a one hour tour up the Hudson to see the waterfront, Manhattan Island, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty up close, it was awesome! A bit chilly that day but the tour was fantastic, the guide especially so and nice to see Lady Liberty up close like that for the first time...couldn't believe I hadn't seen her before...the new World Trade Centre building was also very impressive...
Other sites included Rockefeller Center (the famous X-mas tree had just been put up, huge...), Grand Central Terminal (our hotel was next door), Washington Square, Canal St., High Line, Radio City Music Hall, Chrysler Building...hmm, thinking back now we managed to cram in
Canal Street
...and the many shops o' junk along there... a lot of stuff...also managed an afternoon stroll through Greenwich Village and a great hang in the East Village one night...
Picked up some last minute tix to a Broadway show in Times Square on Saturday, a wonderful one man show called The Encounter...audience had to wear headphones, multiple microphones were placed all over the stage and the performer would move from one to the other while recounting his story, a sonically crazy experience...
The big things happening that weekend were the parades; arrived to the Veteran's Day Parade making its way up 5th Ave. which was cool to see, but the next two days featured Trump protest parades shutting down 5th...and it was then we discovered our hotel was on the wrong side of 5th for everything and everywhere we wanted to go, so experienced the whole drama multiple times over the weekend...crazy...made it easy to get uptown though as we just followed the parade and police blockades...haha...
Grand Finale of the weekend was Peter's show at Joe's Pub, and it was simply amazing...lots of musicians from previous bands and outfits, most notably the East Village Opera Company, Brooklyn Rundfunk Orkestrata, and David Driver, but also
some Cabaret and songs from way back...a truly fun night and great after party, followed by a late night back in East Village at my favourite local 2A...
Fun reminiscing about previous trips and creating the new stories to laugh about down the road...I love this town and hope to be back well before the next fourteen years go by...
(Some photos copyright of Kim M., denoted by (KM)...used with kind permission)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.352s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 35; qc: 143; dbt: 0.2933s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
An amazing city
Glad you are enjoying the big apple