Reaves Family: New York City!!!

At the very end of February, I took a long weekend trip to New York City and met up with two of my best girls, Leslie and Megan. We all went to college together and were in the same sorority, but since we are so scattered now we don't get to see each other much. Since Leslie's second child is due in June, we decided there was no time like the present to get together for a girl's weekend, so we did, no husbands or kids. It was an absolutely great weekend and much needed for all of us. However, it was absolutely FREEZING the whole time we were there - late February, what do you expect?

Here we are in Times Square, some nice German tourists took our picture!

Our first night we saw "Mamma Mia!" on Broadway. It was great - I loved it!

The next day we had an ill-fated adventure for Conan O'Brien standby tickets. They took ticket numbers 1-31 and we had ticket numbers 32, 33, and 34. What luck. But we had a nice rest of the day anyway - we went to Rockefeller Center (you can see the skaters behind us). And no, we did not skate.

We went to the "Top of the Rock" observation deck. Here is a view of Central Park from the top.

We were taking goofy pictures. I was pricking my finger on the Empire State Building.

Walking down the street, I'm sure looking very touristy. We were on our way to or from F.A.O. Schwarz - where we went to make ourselves feel better after being denied from seeing Conan O'Brien. So we just went and bought some surprises for our kids.

Later that night we saw "RENT" on broadway, also very very good. It is leaving broadway in June, and we wanted to make sure to catch it while we could - it was wonderful. There are no pictures because there was a rainy, slushy, snowstorm after we got out of the theatre, and we had dinner reservations that we had to get to and we were desperately trying to keep all of us, especially Leslie, from falling on the icy streets.

We were getting coffee the next morning when we ran into this diner again. After "Mamma Mia" on Thursday night, we just wandered into the place that was closest to the theatre. It happened to be "Ellen's Stardust Diner." This was kind of a neat place, the waiters and waitresses sing and dance, etc. - basically it is aspiring showpeople who are not good enough to make it on broadway and have to support themselves somehow, so they work here. They still get to sing and dance, and some of them are good, but anyway it just made us sad because we knew they all would rather be somewhere else and therefore, we referred to it as the saddest restaurant we had seen on our trip. And Megan and Leslie are illustrating that in this picture.

Moving on, on Saturday morning we took an in-depth bus tour of the highlights of the city. It was great, especially considering how cold it was outside. I have to highly recommend it - we got to see just about anything you could want to see in terms of sightseeing. We thought this sign was typically New York.

In Central Park on the John Lennon mosaic.

We took the Staten Island Ferry, and we got great views of Manhattan from the boat.

I think everyone knows what this is. We didn't get close - we just saw it from the boat, but it is still impressive and we got pretty good pictures.

We even went to Wall Street

After the tour we found, on the recommendations of Oprah, one of the best restaurants ever - SMAC - Sarita's Macaroni and Cheese. A whole restaurant devoted to all different kinds of macaroni and cheese. It was absolutely delicious and I have to highly recommend tracking it down if you are there - even now it hurts me to know I can't just run out and get some.

Later that afternoon Megan was showing off her prowess at hailing a cab.

If you watch "Sex and the City" then you know where we are...this is the Magnolia Bakery behind us. We got great cupcakes and even cooler t-shirts here.