Me N The City: Part 5 – Oh Come ON!

Back to our regularly scheduled program…

Sarah and I went to bed Friday night (ahem ok Saturday morning) in NYC with the quiet joy of knowing we would not have to get up overnight to soothe a little one, that we would not have to share a bed with little limbs flailing everywhere, and that we would not have to rise at 6:00am to the sound of a little one stirring. Ahhh the sheer elation.

So of course the fire alarm in the hotel went off at 5:00am. Not only did we wake up to the ear splitting buzzzz buzzzz buzzzz of the alarm, pumped full of adrenaline and in a total panicked daze, but we woke only four hours after we’d gone to bed. What divine force did we piss off and how do we fix it? We stumbled around throwing on something that could pass for public clothing - in case we ended up standing on a sidewalk watching our possessions burn - and took turns asking “what should we do” as the other stared out the peephole into the hall. We finally decided on calling the front desk (along with about 70% of the hotel guests I would imagine). We were told it was most likely a false alarm and to stay put until the all clear. We were sooo tired we were torn between thoughts of becoming a horrible headline, and thoughts of putting our heads back to bed. Bed won. We decided there would be another alarm or announcement if we actually needed to evacuate and so we tried to settle back down and go back to bed. We did finally drift off, and woke for our day at around 8:00am. Not exactly the relaxing start to our day we had imagined, but as it turns out, very telling of the day that was in store for us.

We had only three real objectives for our day of shopping: 1) Hit the Louis Vuitton flag store, 2) Hit the children’s clothing store, Petite Bateau, 3) Hit Century 21. With our dinner reservations at Butter not until 8:00 this seemed like it would be a piece of cake and we’d have plenty of time to peruse other shops as we came upon them. In fact there were some that we passed on our trek to the Regal the night before that we thought would be lovely to check out.

As we peeked out our window before heading to the lobby, we noticed the sky was overcast. While we mourned the loss of the sun, we agreed it would be nice not having it be so hot while walking around all day. As we walked out of the lobby into the street, lo and behold the street was blocked off and there was a "farmer's market" of sorts right there on Lexington ... and the booth almost smack in front of us… French crepes made with fresh banana and Nutella. Surely this was a sign that things had turned around and that today would be a fantastic day.

We spotted a cute local diner on the corner and headed in for breakfast. After a great greasy spoon breakfast we hit the crepe stand to split some chocolate banana happiness and decided to start plotting our day. I had signed up for web access on my phone before the trip so I would have both GPS navigation while walking the streets, as well as the ability to pull any shop’s webpage if we needed location info. We were ready to take on Manhattan. Or so we thought.

…to be continued.