NYC Vacation—Day 1

I picked up Joe at 7:00, we made our 8:45 flight without incident, and the flight was uneventful.

We tried to buy Bloody Mary’s on the plane, but they didn’t serve alcohol before 11:00, and they didn’t have any vodka anyway. We had a playful time with the flight attendant at least. She didn’t look fun, but turned out to be.


Our room is nice enough—we’re staying at the Four Points Sheraton Chelsea—albeit a little “tight,” but not unexpectedly with precious commodity that real estate is in Manhattan.


After checking in, we caught the metro up to Times Square, checked out the TKTS booth (which has moved out of Times Square), and got some half-priced tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera.

We have both seen Phantom more than once, so it was nice, but nothing fantastic really. Overall, I would say it was “uneventful,” other than the fact of it being Joe’s first Broadway play.

We did manage to finally get our Bloody Mary’s—at $8.00 a pop for a small plastic cup.


Coming out of Phantom, we stopped at the Minskoff to check on some Lion King tickets, which we knew we weren’t going to be able to get at TKTS.

“We can see the show any time from tonight through Sunday night,” I said to the agent. “Is it easy for you to see which of those shows we could get the best seat for?”

She answered before I could even finish my sentence, “I have excellent seats tomorrow night—5th row, center.”

“We’ll take ’em!” I said. Cool!

This officially makes $500.00 that I’ve spent on this play. This’ll be the fourth time I’m seeing it on Broadway, and I saw it once as a traveling show in Raleigh. Totally worth it each time.


We were going to try and see an 8:00 play as well, but ended up bagging that idea as there really wasn’t one that popped out at us as we scanned the TKTS board for the evening shows, and we were a little tired.

We took the metro back to Chelsea, and we stopped by a little local Italian place right by our hotel and grabbed some dinner.


I took a nap, and later in the evening, we went to The Eagle, where there were about 8 people in the bar. We knew we were in a NYC bar, though, and not a Raleigh bar, because porn was on the TV screens inside.

We talked about how a “city that never sleeps” and is home to what, a gazillion people, could have eight people in a bar. But we weren’t bitter.

Joe drank Amstel Light and I drank my standard bourbon and Diet Coke, each round of which came to $9.00 bucks. The biggest surprise of the evening was when I ordered just my drink once, and found out that mine was $3.00 and Joe’s was $6.00. Who knew?

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