This may surprise some of you, but despite what the T-Shirts say, I don't love NY. It is too loud, too crowded, too expensive and too busy for me. BUT....I have to admit there is something to be said about walking around Times Square at night, strolling through Central Park and even doing a touristy thing like going to Rockefeller Center and looking at the tree. We did all those things, even though the thermometer never made it past 40 degrees.
The drive into NYC was typical --traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel, plenty of pedestrians to hit and run over if one is so inclined and taxi drivers who have to pass an insanity test to get a taxi license
. We drove straight our hotel, which was on 44th street, right around the corner from Times Square and the Good Morning America studio.
We arrived just in time to check in, leave our suitcase in the room (which I will get to later) and go have dinner. We walked down 44th street to Triomphe, a small restaurant housed in the Iroquis Hotel. Keith and I both agreed that is was a bargain for NYC. We had the 6 course wine pairing menu and it had to be the best meal we have had since our cruise. The mushroom sauce accompaning the scallop was worth bottling and selling. After eating, we walked around Times Square and went into the M&M Store. If you like M&Ms, that is the place to go.
We walked back to the hotel. I need to go on some hotel travel site and critique it. We give it mixed reviews. For positives, it was a great location and, for NYC, a good price, especially in December where a hotel in the theater district can easily run $500 a night. (Let me interject here that this was a business trip
. Evey year, St. Jude Medical holds a conference here. Keith had a doctor who was supposed to attend, so he had to go to the meetings as well. The conference was in the Westin, on 8th and 43rd, but the reps who attended were put up at this hotel for expense reasons.) Back to the hotel. The color scheme was nice, the TV was a flat screen and they had free wireless internet. For the negatives, the room was small. There was no desk, no place to sit except on the bed, the closet was an armoire that wasn't adequate enough to hang a coat in and the TV was blocked by a basket of overpriced snacks. I had to shove them behind the TV so we could see it. The room faces 44th Street and there is construction going on, so there are steel plates in the street that rattled everytime a car drove over them. If it wsn't for the fact that I always take earplugs with me when I travel, I would have been kept awake most of the night.
Times Square at Night
Friday, December 05, 2008
New York City, New York, United States
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2025-02-13