A Looooong Day

Stonehenge in NYC?

Long awaited trip to New York City.  How's that for starting the blog with a phrase instead of a sentence.  It makes me feel like a journalist.  So here I sit in the Radio City Apartments in New York City looking back on yesterday and wondering how we did it all. We (Marilyn Sandstrom, Judith Reynolds, Lou Falkenstein and I) met at 4:00 a.m. and Dwight drove us to the airport to find that we were the only travelers in the building.  We had to wait half an hour for the airline employee to show up and check our bags.  I guess we should know by now that Durango is a small town airport and there's no reason to show up for a 6:00 a.m. flight at 4:30 a.m.  At least we had no delays getting through the security line, except for Lou's new knee which set off the alarm and gave the sleepy-eyed TSA agents some excitement.  Pity she wasn't carrying.   A change of planes in Denver and many naps later we arrived at La Guardia airport and caught our shuttle to our hotel. 

This little hotel is neither as bad as I had expected, nor as good as I had hoped.  It's clean enough, but small.  There are a lot of Europeans in the lobby; they are used to managing in small spaces.  But we're a compatible group and, although we were too tired to get completely settled in last night, by this morning we have all claimed our necessary space, and it is adequate if not elegant.  We were to meet a friend of Judith's here at the hotel and miraculously she arrived just as we were checking in. After solving a bedding problem more easily than expected, we headed out to explore our surroundings.



Bella Napoli, 49th Street, NYC
Judith, Lou, me, Pet, Marilyn

The hotel is well-located between Times Square and Rockefeller Center.  We can get down and dirty or up and elegant in an instant depending on which way we turn when we walk out the hotel door.  We turned right last night, strolled around Rockefeller Center and, returning to the hotel, found the perfect NY Italian neighborhood restaurant for dinner.  We felt we were on a roll.  After dinner, Judith and Peg and I continued to the York Theatre to watch a performance by our "old" houseguest Mark Nadler.  That was a great start to a New York kind of weekend.  We straggled home afterwards and I, for one, was happy to fall into bed exhausted.