New York Part 1

I've decided to chronicle our trip by the day. The thought of another HUGE New York post makes me a little overwhelmed. And this time I've got way more PICTURES!!! Although maybe not as many as Michael promised since he got tired of carrying around the camera after the first day. This trip was taken with my mom and dad, my 3 younger brothers Sean, Andrew, and Jeff, and Jeff's wife Natalie and me and Michael.

We began our trip Thursday morning the 4th. We all met at my brother Sean's house at 7am for our drive to Phoenix. He very kindly went out and got us all bagels for breakfast! Our travel was pretty uneventful, Jeff was a great chauffer, flights were amazingly on time and we loved watching satellite T.V. on our Jet Blue flight. We arrived at JFK around 8 pm where we were supposed to have a car waiting for us that my mom had reserved in advance. Of course they had no record of us whatsoever, even though we had a confirmation number with us etc. So we hopped in another car and off we went. The first sights of the city always make me deliriously happy, when you come up from the tunnel and there it is! We arrived at our hotel- The Residence Inn Times Square. My parents, who had arrived the day before, were standing outside waiting for us. We're ready to head up to our room when all of a sudden Sean realizes he doesn't have his backpack- he left it in the car that sped off a few moments before. His backpack with his new apple laptop, his ipod and other various important things. Amazingly, his fabulous sister (that would be me) suddenly remembered being given a business card by the guy at the airport, who got us the car. I scrambled through my purse to find it and they quickly called the company. They located the car and said the backpack would be returned within a couple hours. Phew!

We headed over to get some dinner. We stopped at a little roadside pizza joint and it wasn't the best pizza, but who cares! We were in NYC! We went by a subway entrance and I had to go down and get a whiff- Aaaaaaaah,the smell of New York. Call me crazy. Then we went over to Times Square. It was about 2 blocks from our hotel. It was hopping as usual. Sean was unable to enjoy himself because he was still worrying about his backpack, so my dad and him (him and my dad?) headed back to the hotel to wait. To Sean's great relief, it was returned with everything intact, and they met up with us again later. We continued our tour of times square, stopping in our favorite shops and watching the crazy people. I asked a police officer if I could take a picture with him. He said sure and asked if I wanted to sit on his bike! I felt like a star because for some reason lots of people found this entertaining and took my picture! There were some government things going on downtown and further down the road was another officer with a machine gun. He did NOT want his picture taken! We saw Batman, well he was the African American version of Batman, and an old lady wearing lingerie singing songs. NOT a pretty sight! We went to the Hershey's store and the M&M store- lots of chocolate, YUM! We were all pretty tired about this time and went to back to the hotel around 1am. Enjoy the slideshow!