Tuesday in New York City

I’ve given a fair amount of thought as to how to best organize and present our trip to New York City. I considered covering things by event (shows, museums, etc),  by food (boy did we eat good stuff), and by location. And then I decided . . . let’s just go the traditional travelogue route and share by day. I already told you about Monday. And now I’m going to share what we did on Tuesday:

We started our day at Bryant Park with coffee and pastries. It was a very close walk from our hotel room in Times Square and spring was sure in full swing that morning. It was lovely and sunny, the flowers were in bloom and there were people enjoying being outside but it didn’t feel crowded at all.

When we left Bryant Park we walked around to the front of the New York Public Library, which I affectionately call The Mother Ship. I fell down hard in the library gift shop, buying books for Jackie, book bags for me, a Christmas ornament, note cards, and more. Dale went off to check out the Walt Whitman Exhibit while Hannah and I shopped but on our way out Dale asked me to take this photo of him outside the exhibit. Striking resemblance, no?

By then it was lunch time and we headed to the Lower East Side to Katz’s Delicatessen.

This is a must for me every time I visit the city and I always get a half of a corned beef sandwich and the matzo ball soup. This is the first time I’ve actually gone to the counter to order rather than have table service and I must say I felt like a real New York-er doing that! Dale and Hannah split a pastrami sandwich and we all enjoyed the fries, pickles and beer. It was filling and satisfying and makes me wish we had real deli around here.

After lunch we took a tour at The Tenement Museum, another must for me when I’m in the city. We picked the Hard Times tour which focuses on two families living at 97 Orchard St, one during the 1870s and one during the 1930s. The family from the 1930s was Italian and Hannah really enjoyed that since her boyfriend Mikey is Italian. I have to say there was a striking resemblance between Mikey and Adolfo Baldizzi – I guess those Sicilian genes are strong!

It was approaching late afternoon when our tour ended and we headed back to Bryant Park and had wine at an outside cafe. That was pretty darn relaxing but . . . being in the city . . . also expensive so rather than have another drink we packed up and walked back to our hotel. We had some wine and snacks there and got ready for our evening’s entertainment.

Hamilton! I’ve always heard that you can usually get a single seat at the box office and I scored big time when I visited the box office back in March when I was in the city with Jo-Ann. I was able to get 3 single seats for Dale, Hannah and I. We put Hannah up in the mezzanine (young eyes and ears) and Dale and I had seats in the 4th and 6th row. We were dead center and so close I still can’t believe it. All around me I could hear people chattering about how much they paid and how long ago they had bought the tickets and I’m sitting there thinking . . . yeah, I bought these a month ago and paid $235 each. Amazing.

I have to say, it was even better the second time. I think that was partly because I was sitting so close but I also thinking sitting by myself contributed to the experience, too. I was completely immersed in the whole thing with no thought as to whether my companions were enjoying themselves. They were, of course, and we had plenty to talk about after the show, but for that time I was truly in the moment.

And that’s a wrap on Tuesday. It was a long (like this post) and fun (hopefully also like this post) day!