TheKirklands.net: A Week in New York City

We flew directly from Montreal to New York City after the wedding. New York was one of the cities we actually missed last year driving around the country. It was initially on our agenda, but as we learned, driving around and parking in big cities can be annoying and expensive. So we skipped New York on the road trip, and just planned to fly in/our sometime later.

I represented Canonical at the Cloud Expo in New York that week. (I have received an unending series of spam from vendors at Cloud Expo ever since that week -- I dare say it was the worst conference I have ever attended!)

Okay, griping aside, we had a great time in New York. I worked until 6 or 7pm each day while Kim was a gal out on the town.

We stayed in a phenomenal location, the historic New Yorker Hotel.

It was built in 1929, in full Art Deco glory.

Our view out of the hotel showed one small bit of Manhattan.

We arrived on Sunday afternoon, and just walked around the town, starting in Times Square, of course.

We dipped into FAO Schwartz to see the giant piano from Big. You can buy your own for $250,000!

We went to an excellent comedy show later that night on the upper east side, at the Comic Strip, and then called it a night.

The next day, Kim hit a few museums while I attended the conference.

She says here favorite part of the Natural History museum was the gemstone collection.

On Monday evening, we met an old friend of mine from high school who's living in New York now. We hung out on the roof top of Lucy's Retired Surfer bar, with a grand view of our hotel.

Cade and I go way back, to high school. We probably hadn't seen one another in 10 years, but it's always fun to catch up with an old friend.

Kim set off sight seeing again on Tuesday, walking around Central Park and taking in the city.

She also visited an arts and crafts museum and loved the quilts.

On Wednesday, we met up with a few of my work colleagues to have dinner and drinks.

Thursday night, we attended the Yankees/Red Sox game at the New Yankee Stadium!

The subways were packed, and we (I) made a bad decision, taking the first train that arrived, which was a local train rather than the express. I think it stopped 40 times, and then quit running, leaving us to catch the express at the end of the line.

Anyway, we were nearly an hour late getting to the game, which really had me bummed that we were to have missed the beginning of the game.

Alas, during our hour underground, the skies had opened, and the game was rain delayed! What a stroke of luck! Or so we thought...

We had some time to kill, so we walked the full perimeter of the stadium, taking in the views from all angles. We also spent some time in the Yankee Hall of Fame Museum, which was a neat look at the history of the team.

My appreciation of the rain delay faded as the hours past. First pitch wouldn't happen until 10:35pm -- three and a half hours late. Wow. Kim was a trooper, though, and surprisingly, we stayed the whole time.

We were excited to see them pull back the tarp and reveal the perfectly dry infield.

Rolling the tarp back up seemed like a colossal pain the butt.

Okay, so what's the first thing you do after uncovering the field because it rained too much?

Yep, you got it. You water it down! I mean, I know why and all. But the irony was just incredible. It rained for three and a half hours, so much so that they couldn't play baseball. The infield was covered, to keep it from getting wet. When it stopped raining, they covered the field. And hosed it down. Yeesh.

So we made it back to our seats before first pitch. We were in the left field bleachers, just above the left field wall. Great seats!

The game didn't finish until 1:30am, and many seats had cleared out by this time, so we moved right down to the front row. We had a few line drives hit in our direction, but no home run balls...

All in all, a great experience! Again, thanks to Kim for sticking it out!

I took Friday off, and we checked out of the New Yorker and into the breathtaking Waldorf Astoria (booked on a Hilton Honors reward).

Another classic hotel, built around the same time as the New Yorker. The original Waldorf-Astoria was demolished for the building of the Empire State Building. The inside is absolutely as lush as you'd expect it to be.

I got to spend Friday wandering around New York with Kim, which was really nice. We walked by St. Patrick's Cathedral.

And stepped into the NBC Studios building in 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Kim was excited to see Juliana somebody-or-another, filming a little clip.

While she was watching that, I stepped out into the hall and a lady asked me if I was in line for the Jimmy Fallon rehearsal. I said, "Maybe. What if I am?" And she said, "Well, they're going back right now, head over that way." So I quickly pulled Kim away from Juliana and Jason Secrest and we saw good hour of Jimmy Fallon rehearsing his Friday night monologue and his "Thank You Notes." This was an awesome experience, and I highly recommend it! He tells a lot more jokes during the rehearsal than he does on the show, and it was really impersonal and laid back. The connection with the audience seemed quite genuine.

We wandered around the NBC gift shop, where Kim bought a Dwight Schrute bobble head, and I bought a Michael Scott "World's Best Boss" coffee mug :-)

The outside of The Rock looks like something out of Atlas Shrugged. I liked it a lot.

We stopped back at the Waldorf for a bit, now that we could check into our room, which was really nice and fancy.

And then we walked a couple of blocks down Park Avenue to Grand Central Terminal

Grand Central is about as iconic as a train station could possibly be.

We took the subway down to lower Manhattan, where we really hadn't been yet on this trip. We started at Ground Zero, to pay our respects, and we were both surprised to see how quickly the Millennium Tower seems to be going up.