Yellow cab, gypsy cab, dollar cab, holla back | Sunday & Monday

Sunday

Sunday was our appointed touristy day. We made reservations for a bus tour around Midtown and Downtown. It was very cool! You get on the tour bus at Times Square and then it goes all around the city, stopping at different places. You can hop off at any of the stops and then when you're done, you just head back to the bus stop you got off at and continue the tour with a new bus! Very smart! Our tour went to the following places:

• Times Square
• Greenwich Village
• Empire State Building
• Union Square
• SoHo
• Chinatown
• Little Italy
• East Village
• Rockefeller Center
• World Trade Center Site
• United Nations

So, we started the tour and then hopped off at Little Italy for lunch. We had the most incredible lunch ever. The only time I've ever had better Italian was in Italy. Brian had spaghetti and meatballs and I had eggplant parmesan. It was the real-deal-Italian!

When we got back on the bus, we made it around to the United Nations and then hopped off so that we could walk up to Grand Central Station. The G.C. is very cool in that old school way that just makes train stations so romanticized. A few months ago we watched a History Channel special on Grand Central, so it was very cool to see what we had watched on the show.

As we were heading back to the bus stop, we came across a cool coffee shop: Aroma Espresso Bar, where we sat and chilled for a while. One hot chocolate and one mocha later, we finished our tour and then took the subway to one of the areas around NYU to a nice little bookstore: Shakespeare & Co. We spent a lot of time there decompressing and flipping through books.

Afterward, we went back to Times Square and found an Irish Pub to eat dinner and watch the Super Bowl. Our dinner was fair and the bar scene was completely lame, so we decided to go to a free improv comedy show that I had come across in one of the books I read at the bookstore. The show was the Upright Citizens Brigade and it was supposed to start at 9:30 p.m. and we were supposed to get there at 8:15 p.m. to get free tickets. Well, for some reason, they weren't doing a 9:30 show, but we were able to go in to the 7:30 show that was already in progress and watch the rest of it. We got there around 8:05 and then saw about 2 hours of the show, so I really don't think we missed much and it was FREE! It was incredibly offensive, perverted, and over the top, so, naturally, we loved it! We laughed so hard. I highly recommend it if you're not one to get offended.

After the show, we were tired and it was cold, so we decided to splurge and take a cab back from Manhattan to our hotel. It was about $35, including the tip, so it was expensive, but completely worth it!

Monday

Monday was basically a driving day, but we weren't in too much of a hurry to get back (we picked Gatsby up Tuesday after work), so we slept late and then headed out to find a good pizza place for lunch. We ended up at Nick's Pizza in Queens. It was very, very good and the area in Queens was really cool. We were able to get half the pizza my way and half Brian's way and each ended up bringing home two slices, so it was very excellent to get two meals out of it!

After lunch, we drove through Manhattan so that we could see Central Park West and Harlem and then The Bronx (so that we could hit up all five boroughs). There were SO MANY dog walkers out in CPW. It was sooo funny. If I was rich and lived in NYC, I would definitely be a CPW kinda girl. Gatsby is absolutely a CPW kinda doggie!

After that, it was pretty much just driving until we got to Baltimore and D.C. where it was pretty much just driving with 5 feet snow walls lining the roads! :-)

We ate dinner at the Max and Erma's in Richmond (one of our favorite Ohio restaurants) and then got back to Knightdale around 11 p.m.