Pictures from our trip are up on Facebook; they should be visible to everyone!
Thursday Night and Friday
I left work on Thursday and headed straight to Lowe's Foods to pick up some granola bars and soft drinks for our cooler (I am the granola bar queen on trips!). When Brian got home, we quickly got the car loaded and headed out. (Brian had taken Gatsby to Suite Paws Thursday morning before work.) We had decided that we would eat dinner at the IHOP in Knightdale because it's close by, good, and usually quick. Well, Thursday night it was good, but not quick. We got stuck with chick who was working her first week at the IHOP and she took for-freaking-ever. I'm not kidding. It took us an HOUR AND A HALF to eat dinner. All we could do was sit back, laugh, and enjoy the lengthy dinner. It was pretty hilarious considering we were driving to Baltimore.
As we left the restaurant, Brian realized that he had left his phone at home, so we had to swing by the house to pick it up. Helluva portent for our trip!! :-) The rest of the drive was very uneventful. We basically just blasted the iPod through most of North Carolina and Virginia until we got into the listening area for WTOP (our favorite FM newsradio station in D.C.).
Our hotel in Baltimore was really cool. It was just a Holiday Inn Express, but it was in an old bank building from the early 1920s. The building had been completely redone, but they kept a lot of the architecture from the original building. It still had the vault and the old elevator shaft visible. One of the hotel employees told me at breakfast that the bank was the only bank in Baltimore to survive the Great Depression.
Friday morning we got up around 9 a.m. to leave the area before the snowpocalypse arrived. We headed to Philly to get cheesesteaks. Well, Brian had a cheesesteak and I had a chicken philly (yes, I forsook my pescetarian diet twice on this trip!). We went to this place called Jim's Steaks and it was pretty good. It came as a recommendation from one of Brian's coworkers; we were trying to avoid the super touristy cheesesteak places because those places typically only have cheesesteaks and I really didn't want to eat beef.
After lunch, we were NYC bound! Oh yeah, and we screwed the state of Delaware by hopping off the interstate before the toll plaza and then getting back on an exit later. Power to the people! We had some traffic coming into the city, but really not too bad for a Friday afternoon. We got to our hotel (another Holiday Inn Express, in Queens) and checked in. Our room was on the first floor, which is actually like the basement. We walked in and there was an A/C unit in the window and I was bummed. Brian was also bummed. So he went back to the front desk and we were able to switch rooms to the third floor. I felt a lot safer being off the ground and our new room had so much more sunlight and a stunning view of the Long Island Expressway! ;-)
After we decompressed for a bit, we got dressed up and caught the (free!) shuttle from our hotel to the subway station, which we took directly to Times Square. We went to the TKTS booth and bought tickets for the off-Broadway show Newsical: The Musical. We only had about an hour before the show started, so we decided to hit up a deli that was down the street from our theatre. I had some huge avocado, cucumber, sprouts, carrots wrap-deal and Brian had an Italian sandwich. Both of them were HUGE; neither of us could finish our meals.
We got to the theatre and we were the first ones there! We were kind worried that maybe it was going to suck because the theatre wasn't too big and no one was there yet, but pretty quickly thereafter it started to fill up and the show was HILARIOUS. It was so funny. It spoofed current events as a musical and we were laughing so hard! (Our favorite was "Hillary Clinton" singing "Who the Hell is Barack?")
After the show, we went back to Times Square and had dessert at ESPN Zone. Really yummy and we got to catch the end of the Canes/Sabres game!
Then we took the subway back to our hotel and waited out in the freezing cold for 15 minutes for the hotel shuttle to pick us up! :-)
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