New York City (December 2019)

I was blessed with a whirlwind 24ish hour trip to NYC to be part of a daytime talk show, and so without much time to research as well as not a set amount of time to explore, I found myself blindly boarding the plane on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-December and letting my expectations fly out the window. There is a whole other set of posts about this trip on my Personal/Family blog (Part 1, Part 2), but this is more of an overview of the places I stayed, where I ate, etc.

Accommodations

I stayed at the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott New York Manhattan/Central Park, which was a great location while remaining fairly "quiet" overall, considering I was in the city that never sleeps. The room was comfortable and quiet and clean, and I had no concerns about it at all. I will say that it was a bit awkward as far as how to get in. Maybe it's like this in most hotels in the city, but in order to get to the elevator bay, you have to go through the bar and then use your key to get through a door. Once inside, I was a little confused as to where to go. Maybe I wasn't listening well enough when they explained, but I went down this long hallway before a maintenance worker directed me back to the elevator. Then, when I got up to my floor, there were 3 other workers up there apparently going in to perform maintenance on a room just down the hall from mine. I just found that odd as it was already about 7pm, and it seemed an odd time to be performing maintenance to the degree that it required 3 guys.
All was fine, though, and I settled in. The staff was friendly and I have no real complaints about the place at all! I appreciated that no one could just walk right in and go to my room, but that they had to have a key to even get to the part where there were rooms. The extra security measure when you're visiting a city like NYC for the first time helped me feel more safe as a single woman by myself in the city.

Dining

Having such limited time in NYC, I was only able to really eat two meals there: Supper the first night and Lunch the next day. I *could* have had breakfast if I hadn't stayed out so late exploring, but I woke up later than anticipated and didn't have a plan, so I just went to the studio right away, where they thankfully had some snacks for me.

The Greek Kitchen

website

I didn't really take pictures here, but I tried the traditional Greek dish Mousaka for supper, which was very tasty, but I later regretted as it not only had tomatoes but also cheese, and I recently discovered that I have both a tomato and dairy sensitivity. But it was yummy for those who don't have that for sure! The staff was very friendly and kind, it wasn't too busy on a Wednesday evening, and the service was quick. Our drinks were filled regularly as well. I'd definitely return. They had a great menu as well!

Tender Restaurant

website

After exploring Times Square and Rockefeller Center and strolling up and down Broadway, we opted to find some sushi, and while searching for Sushi by Bou, we stumbled into Tender and were so glad we did! We tried their Dragon Roll, Rockfeller and Tender Roll, and all three were delicious!

Exploring

I really didn't know that I was going to have the rest of an afternoon to explore the city, so the first night in town, although it was fairly late when I finished supper, I opted to walk down to see what the hype was about down on Broadway and to go see the tree all lit up in Rockefeller Plaza. I'll give you my general opinion on what I saw, then go into detail a tinge about the highlights.

First of all, NYC was not even sort of a little bit scary for me as a single woman to walk around in the evening. Not even slightly. There were so many friendly people, and the atmosphere was so fun! There were street vendors all over the place selling REALLY great quality hats, scarves, gloves, handbags and other trinkets.

Broadway Street

You'll laugh at this, but it dawned on me when I hit about 62nd Avenue that I was walking on THE Broadway. Like...The Broadway that everyone talks about and sings about and all that. Don't ask me why I hadn't realized that or thought about it before, but let's just say that even just walking up and down the street was entertainment enough for me for probably the entire night. It was impressive. It was so cool! And it really is true that this is the "city that never sleeps". By 11:30pm, there were still TONS of people out exploring the city, all the street vendors were still out, and the atmosphere was electric! Oh, and the vendors selling gloves and hats? Oh my word are they great quality! I bought a LOT of hats and mittens and gloves haha :)

Rockefeller Plaza

Okay, now THIS was cool! A couple random observations about the area are that the tree seemed much smaller than I had anticipated. I wish I had MUCH longer to explore the shops around the area. It is not even sort of remotely worth it to have your picture taken by the dudes with the little DSLR camera by the tree lol My phone died and my backup battery pack died and I didn't have any pictures and was almost ready to pay $20 to get a single picture when I came to my senses. For one, they have no idea what they're doing. But also, they basically just run down the street to the nearest drugstore to print the picture, so...yeah. It was weird. And they don't know how to shoot with a DSLR at all.

I could've spent a few hours here, having a drink and people watching. Very fun, very cool place!

Times Square

I feel like this was a bit of a let down, honestly. It was cool and impressive and all, but it was basically like you just are walking down the street, and then there it is, and you take a picture and it's cool and then you leave. Maybe I missed something, but there wasn't anything to actually "do" there. I mean, there's were some guys dressed up in costumes that you can take your picture with, but they worked for tips, and made it very clear that $20 was the expected tip if we got to take our picture with them, and well...no.

Colorado 2018 Part 1: Littleton, Red Rocks, Idaho Springs and Lookout Mountain

My eldest son and I made a whirlwind trip to Littleton, Colorado for a weekend, as one of my very best friends from High School was getting married, and there was no way I was going to miss it! We had such a great time, even if we could've used a vacation from vacation upon our return ;)

I thought I'd do a short recap of our time there, as well...any recaps these days are super short due to being a single Mom of 4 kids under age 7 and managing a full-time job and a husband in assisted living slowly slipping away to bvFTD. Still, blogging and recapping my life is one of my very favorite things to do in my "spare" time, so here I am :)

We left after a couple days at the farm down in Iowa, and drove home to switch bags a bit and grab a couple things we had forgotten, then made it to the airport with time to spare to eat. (Granted, it wasn't really long enough since the food took way longer than we thought, so we ended up having to take it to go on the plane)

Cashel declared this the very best day of his entire life after he was able to sit up in the cockpit with the pilot and check out all the controls :)

Our flight got in right around 9pm, but by the time we picked up our bags and rental car, we didn't make it down to Littleton to our airbnb until around 11pm their time (midnight ours back in Minnesota).

It was so nice to see two of my good friends from growing up in Indiana, who were staying at the same place with us there! They (as well as the host) stayed up to wait for us, but we headed to bed very soon after getting in and unpacking our things.

Morning came a little too early for me, what with the time change and all, and my normal wake up time being 5am CST. I "slept in" until 6am MT (which was actually 5am CST), then crept around to find some coffee and settled in to relax a bit and watch most of Mamma Mia. This was one of those (extremely small) windows of peace and rest I had during our trip, and there weren't many of those!

It was short-lived, however, when Cashel came down for the morning and did a song and dance for me :) We grabbed some quick breakfast, made a quick stop at Target for a card and some hiking boots for Mama, and then made our way on over to Red Rocks for some morning hiking!

Red Rocks Hike and Amiptheatre

It was a GORGEOUS day for a hike! We were perfectly comfortable in long-sleeve shirts and pants - I even got so warm in my sweatshirt that I had to tie it around my waist at one point!

We hiked for a while, then made our way back to our car and hopped in a for a short drive further up to the ampitheatre.

We didn't stick around there long or hike on down to check out the view from the bottom due to Mama's feet being a little sore after hiking in new boots that morning. Also, we had hoped to make it to Idaho Springs to have lunch at Beau Jo's and have a little time to explore around there as well. The view heading that direction was SO BEAUTIFUL!

Idaho Springs: Beau Jo's and Shopping

Yes, please! I knew about Beau Jo's from a road trip my hubby and I took back in 2009, where these same friends took us here for supper one night. I knew Cashel would think it was cool with the enormous crust, so we opted to have lunch here again. Cashel, however, was not so amused at all the drive time, and then having to ::gasp:: WAIT for our food to be made. (Can you tell we don't do sit-down restaurants a whole lot as a single Mom with 4 little kids?)

After lunch, we hit up a few of the shops before Cashel got too antsy to keep going lol

We thought the rainbow ice at the top of the frozen waterfall was a nice added touch :)

We stopped to pick up a Napoleon (Cashel's choice) and a chocolate croissant (Mama's choice) at a little bakery before leaving town to head up to Lookout Mountain on the way back to Littleton. The Napoleon was DELICIOUS, but ended up a disaster after Cashel sat on it in the bag, so the chocolate croissant is all I was able to get a picture of ;) SO.GOOD!

Lookout Mountain

The views from Lookout Mountain were just absolutely breathtaking! But it was COLD up there, so we didn't stick around too terribly long. We wish so badly that we had tacked a couple extra days onto our trip to really get out there into the mountains instead of just viewing them from afar, but it was SO BEAUTIFUL! Considering how much the mountains call to me, I'm not really sure how we ended up living in such a flat state, aside from knowing that the full seasons really speak to me too, and the autumn colors in Minnesota are hard to beat!

The rest of the evening was the wedding, which I don't plan to recap on my travel blog, but stay tuned for day 2 of our adventure in Denver, covering the Aquarium, Children's Museum and heading home soon!