NYC Part I

The blog was on hiatus while we were out of town. We decided to celebrate our sixth year of marital bliss in the Big Apple. We figure, it’s easier to make this kind of impulse trip now (before we have kids), so we should take every opportunity. And this was a perfect opportunity, really. Our big day corresponded with US Thanksgiving, so we could go down and see the big parade and have a big turkey feast with my cousin and my little brother, who both live there.

Did you know that it only takes 7 hours to drive from Ottawa to New York? Do you know where Ottawa is? Not everyone does. A lot of people asked us where we were visiting from. When we said “Ottawa”, we got quite a few blank looks. We did our best to be ambassadors for Ottawa, telling people about all the great activities that Ottawa has to offer. More than once, we talked about skating on the canal and enjoying Winterlude. In retrospect, this may be a weak selling point. There are probably few people from New York City who are looking to travel north during the winter. We’ll have to come up with some more ideas.

Wednesday was mostly just a travel day. We drove down quite casually, and met up with T (my brother) at his apartment. He and a roommate share a two-bedroom place on the Upper East Side. It’s nice enough, but man is it small! T’s bedroom is big enough for a loft bed with a chair underneath. He moved the chair to the living room so that we could put our inflatable mattress on the floor under the loft bed. Once it was set up, there was almost enough room for two people to stand in the doorway. His roommate had a visitor sleeping on the couch, so we had 5 people jammed into that little place.

I guess they have a lot of visitors – cheap people like us. A decent hotel in Manhattan is at least 100 bucks / night, but usually more like 200 bucks – and that doesn’t include parking. By mooching off these guys, we saved a ton of cash. I did the math, and it costs them nearly $50 each per night to live there. Not a cheap place to live, not a cheap place to visit.

R didn’t do so well on the inflatable mattress. She never sleeps well the first night away from home. It always takes her a day to adapt to a new bed. She didn’t have a lot of time to adapt anyways, since we were getting up early for the parade.