Summer Vacation III

June15

I wasn't even dreaming. It was that heavy, unconscious sleep that I hadn't had in a long time. It took me a minute to process the buzzing of my cell phone that was set on vibrate. I slowly opened my eyes and fumbled around on the nightstand next to my head. Fek. My phone was ringing and I didn't want to answer it. But I did.

"Good morning. NY Bride decided to do the brunch today after all. It'll be at Grand Luxe. She said to be in the lobby by 11:30 and she'll pick us all up."

"Um. OK. All of us? Yeah. OK, yeah. See you then."

It was 10:00 in the morning. We drug our slug asses out of bed and got ready. All four of us in the room were begging for more sleep with our eyes but went through the motions to get dressed in relative silence. We were in the lobby by 11:30 as instructed.

11:30...12:00.....12:30....Man, I'm really hungry.......1:00...We are finally getting into cars and driving to Queens. What happened to Grand Luxe? Well, it just so happened that it was Father's Day, and you know what that means for brunch at a restaurant. The wait was too long and they had to come up with another plan. We were going to order food from somewhere instead and eat it at NY Bride's grandmother's house. OK off we go. Finally.

We got to grandma's house and settled in. And then we waited for a little longer.

Then a couple of us we went to a local Italian place to order the food.

While the food was cooking we went to a local market for sodas and stuff. I took a picture because we don't have Jamaica soda at my market. Still a tourist. ;)

The rest of our day was wasted...I mean spent...at grandma's house. We were finally dropped back off at the hotel around 6 p.m. Don't get me wrong, we very much appreciated being fed and spending more time with the couple. While it was nice to hang out and the food was really tasty, we agreed it would have been better for us to spend those hours exploring the city or doing something. (brunch at a restaurant would have had us back to the hotel by 1:30 at the latest) After all, we were only going to be there for one more day. Upon a brief discussion at the hotel the four of us decided we were going into The City that night. We were going to celebrate my birthday and see Times Square. After a short nap.

We invited NY Bride and another bridesmaid along for our journey, but they declined because they were too tired. Light weights. ;) We got a ride to the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) from one of the shuttle drivers and mapped out our route. We were determined to get to Times Square and back one way or another.

Mel (long curly haired girl), Copper (her husband), Hubbs and I hopped on the train and arrived to our destination--Penn Station! Wheee!

We took our obligatory Times Square tourist photo along with some other stuff along our stroll through Manhattan.

Then we got to a restaurant recommended by the monkey via a few text messages (thanks monkey!). We were so hungry and very happy to find it. What? Closed!

So sad! We walked around a bit and finally came across a little French place and decided to have dinner. We were so hungry by then--it was almost 12:00!

After dinner we walked back to the train station. I took more pictures of Madison Square Gardens, NYPD station, the faint outline of the Empire State Building, and some hookers. On our walk back I even spotted Jeremy Irons sitting outside a bar/cafe decked out in a tuxedo. No one else knew who he was so I was alone in my excitement. Aside from Hubby being attacked in Penn Station by a bag lady, we made it back to Long Island around 3 a.m. with no obstacles.

I had so much fun on our little adventure! There's a definite energy in Times Square. I likened it to being in Vegas...there's a charge in the air and everything is lit up. I was beat by the end of the night though, and so were the others. We all crawled into bed, set the alarm for the morning, and fell into sweet silence followed by much needed sleep.