On the road with Jim and Pat: Hello from the Holiday Inn in New York City.

Wednesday Morning; March 26, 2008 (first travelogue of this trip)

We are currently located here. If you “pan” out you will see that we are in the south end of Manhattan. That puts us less than a mile from the World Trade Center site and a bit over 2 miles from Times Square and Rockefeller Center. More about these locations later. The map should show up in the satellite version. If not, you can click on that option, as it has a lot of detail that is fun to play with.

Many of you are aware that Pat has earned several cruises (seven) through her association with Stampin' Up! All of these trips are done in a first class manner with all of the travel/cruise expenses paid (including tips on the ship). The cruise accommodations include balcony rooms!

This trip is a cruise to Bermuda departing from New York. We decided to come to New York a few days early to do some sightseeing. We chose to take a red eye flight (left Denver at 12:35AM) so that we could have an “extra” day in NY. Seemed like a good idea, since we assumed the flight would not have a full load of passengers (yeah right, every seat was full!) Our plan to sleep on the plane did not work well. Our seats were a part of the emergency exit area and did not recline. I got maybe two hours sleep and Pat did not sleep at all.

We took a taxi from Laguardia airport to the hotel. The taxi trip was the usual “white knuckles” adventure. We got to the Hotel about 8:00 AM and were able to check in.. We used points for two nights and paid for the other two. The hotel rate is about $200 per night! The room only had one desk chair and a king size bed. It was very small with almost no place to put our four suitcases of clothes (plus two carry-ons). Pat did get an extra desk chair, and has it beside her side of the bed (has to crawl around it to get into bed). See photo below

Our tiny room at the Holiday Inn

We had breakfast and then took a two hour nap. In the afternoon, we decided to do some sightseeing around the hotel. The hotel is located near the SOHO area of Manhattan. SOHO is described as one of the most diverse neighborhood in lower Manhattan. The following is pasted from the website http://www.sohonyc.com/:

“Today, with stores like Intermix, SoHo is synonymous with trendy shopping, world class art galleries, some of the most sought after real estate ("Finding anything under $1 million in Soho is a job," so says Siim Hanja of Stribling & Associates), the future site of Mr Donald Trump's latest building and of course it's cobblestone streets and cast iron buildings.”

SOHO is centered about Broadway street. We did a little walking along the crowded sidewalks and were amazed at the huge traffic jams in mid-afternoon. I am sure we will do a bit more exploring there.

While watching the Travel Channel a few weeks ago, we watched a show on the best pizza restaurants in New York City (NYC prides itself on having the best pizza in the world). We made a small list of fun ones we wanted to visit. Yesterday we went to Lombardi's (see photos below). Lombardi's (http://www.firstpizza.com) opened in 1897 and has been rated as having the best pizza in NY several times. After having perhaps the best pizza we have ever tasted, we made a quick stop at Eileen's Cheesecake (http://eileenscheesecake.com/gallery2.htm) to get a couple of pieces of their great cheesecake (again, NYC prides itself as having the best cheesecake in the world”).