New York City - August 2016

On Broadway

After the movers loaded the truck in Baltimore, we needed a place to stay between houses so we opted for a weekend in New York City.  Keith was on the east coast with work that week, so he flew in from Detroit.  It was an early flight, but fortunately the Quin Hotel had a room ready for an 8:30am check in.  Shawna had been able to get one of the hotel nights free with her Chase points.  That enabled Keith to work in the room all day as he had back to back conference calls.  Shawna met the cleaners at the Baltimore house in the morning before getting the train up to New York, arriving around 2pm.

We decided to go for a walk in the Central Park before dinner.  Is was super hot and insanely humid, so Shawna bailed out at 85th street and took a cab back to the hotel while Keith walked the reservoir and down the west side back to the hotel.  While on the walk Keith, used the time to make a couple of calls.  One of them was to a former colleague Steve who lives in Los Angeles.  After chatting for 10 minutes they made the connection that Steve and his wife Monica were actually in New York at that very moment and happened to have tickets to Hamilton for the same Saturday matinee that we did!  So, we arranged to meet them for lunch on Saturday before the show. 

Our Favorite Walk in Central Park

Dinner was at ABC Cocina, which is a Jean-Georges restaurant.  We sat next to a couple who had spent the day shopping for wedding venues for their daughter so we laughed with them as they regaled us with the highlights of the day.  The restaurant is tapas style and the food was delicious.  We had the tomato salad, shrimp with garlic, short rib tacos, maitake mushrooms, and the tenderloin with chimichurri.  All the food was flavorful.

Saturday morning we slept in until 8:30 as the room had a blackout blind.  Keith ran over to Starbucks to get breakfast before we headed out to Central Park again.  We needed to be back to the hotel pretty quickly so only made it to the south side of the reservoir.  We showered quickly and got dressed to meet Steve and Monica for lunch at Blue Fin.  We had a great lunch with a couple of lobster salads and some sushi which was delicious, and balanced it all out with 3 glasses of rose each!  We then walked around the corner to the Richard Rogers theater where we saw Hamilton!  While the tickets were ridiculously expensive, the show was terrific - original, creative, and even had some humorous interludes.  Definitely a better way to learn history than a boring textbook.  It was also fun that Lexi Lawson who plays Hamilton's wife is a friend of Steve and Monica's.

Hamilton - Keith, Monica, Steve and Shawna

After the show, we took a cab down to Upland at Park and 26th where we had another delicious dinner, including the whole crispy mushroom, pappardelle, and the long island duck, as well as a side of corn.  The food was another successful choice!

Sunday was departure day, so we did a final walk around the park before returning to the room to cool off (it took 30 minutes to stop sweating!) and relaxed a bit.  We checked out and had lunch at Fresh and Co where we got a salad.  We then went to the airport where we were both on the same flight to Chicago and then split up there - Keith going to Seattle for work and Shawna going to Phoenix so she could close on the house on Monday.