That is the opening line to one of my favorite songs by Rosie Thomas. She has a few songs that are about New York, and they’ve been playing over and over in my head since we’ve gotten here.

Matt and I left on a train from Oyster Bay in Long Island yesterday around 1 or 2 yesterday afternoon. We have been running ever since then. We take the train, then transfer to the NY subway. We take the subway into the city, and try not to hit people with all our junk and have a really hard time going through the revolving doors to get to the stairs that go up to the street. We hoist all of our suitcases, guitars, and whatever else up the stairs. It’s dirty, wet, and smells nasty in the subway. But I don’t care. I’m so excited, right…then I see the light at the top, but that’s really all I can see. Mind you, I’ve never been in New York. The first view I see when I get up to the street took my breath away:

Matt and I lugged our luggage (ha, hence the name) to the hotel from the subway, and as soon as we got inside we felt like we stepped inside this beautiful garden. We are staying at the Hudson Hotel right down the street from Columbus Circle at the southwest end of Central Park. It’s beautiful, and we have had so much fun here. Seriously, everything at the hotel looks exactly like the pics on the website. Our room is really great. But right after we set our stuff down we got back on the subway to go to the TKTS ticket booth to try to get half off tickets for the broadway show, the Lion King. We got there, and it wasn’t on the list. So we dashed over to the Minskoff Theater where it was playing. We got there, totally sold out and there were already hopefuls waiting in line for cancellations. So, we waited for an hour and a half too (after a quick trip to the Virgin Megastore) and, no luck. No Lion King for us. As we walked away we indulged in a hot dog to drown our (my) sorrows, and we walked by a guy selling tickets to Dangerfield’s Comedy Club. It wasn’t quite the show we were thinking, but we figured hey, what the heck. We both got in for 20 bucks. So we got some dinner at this place in Times Square called Maxie’s, then hopped on the Subway again to head down to the comedy club. Matt was like “I didn’t think you would go for this; it might be pretty dirty comedy.” I got a little nervous about that, hadn’t really thought about the fact that this could be totally raunchy. But we get there, sit down at this totally crowded club, and we get settled in (after walking 3 blocks in the rain) with some hot coffee. Then we laughed our highnesses off. It was such a great show, and the only guy that was really nasty was the last guy and we were so tired by then that we laughed. We listened to these 5 comedians that were sooooo funny! When it was all done, we came back to the hotel and totally crashed.

Today when we woke up, we took our time getting ready and left a little before lunchtime. We randomly chose this little place to eat lunch, which ended up being this fantastic little french cafe, called Brasserie Ruhlmann. We had the nicest lunch with this great view and sweet little table.

Then came the major tourist-y stuff. We took a tour of NBC studios, which was sooooo cool. We got to sit in the set for SNL, so much fun. Then we did the coolest thing we could have done. We bought tickets for Top of the Rock, a special ticket to go to the very top of Rockerfeller Center on the viewing deck. It was absolutely stunning. These pics are great, but they don’t even compare to what I saw with my own eyes. My jaw just dropped and I was amazed at what we saw. It was beautiful.

After a while of deciding what to do next, we wound up having dinner and dessert in Little Italy. It was so great, and that’s a whole other blog. I’ll blog about that later, but for now, my eyes are so heavy and I’m going to fall asleep, and the story about Little Italy is too long and too great. Good night for now, and I’ll keep this posted!