NYC!!!!!

My sisters and I are in the Big Apple. We are managing to cram so much stuff into our days that we are quite exhausted. Since there's so much stuff, I'll only write about our first day in this post, then write about other days later...way too many details for one post!!!

So, we flew out of Houston on Sunday. The airport stuff was long (who knew so many people would be flying out of Hobby the Sunday before Memorial Day?). We got through security, then went to the gift shop, then to our gate. We were in group A on Southwest, so we moseyed over and stood in line. There were some guys being searched and we were saying how we would be so embarassed. My youngest sister, Laury, said "If that happened to me, I would freak out." Right after she said that, this little man came up to us and told her to come with him. She had to go be searched!!! They do the metal detector wand and everything. Missy & I could not stop laughing. Well, we did stop laughing long enough to take her picture, which, if I could figure out how to upload, I would totally do now. The one good thing about the search was that Laury got on the plane first and we got the exit row seats. I usually avoid these because I'm scared of having to actually do something during an emergency. But, man these are awesome...so roomy!

The flight is uneventful, except that both my sisters are scared of flying, so I had to calm them down some, but we made it. Had to change planes in Chicago, then on to NYC. Well, not exactly NYC. Because I had these vouchers, we flew into Long Island...tiny airport called Islip. I had a car reserved for us, so we called them and they came to pick us up. Only, I couldn't remember the name of the car company, so we weren't entirely sure that the guy we got in the car with wasn't going to kill us. Fortunately, he didn't. He was actually pretty friendly and made fun of us for having so much luggage (one of my bags was 49 lbs, just 1 lb shy of having to pay extra!).

We got to our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott in Midtown Manhattan. I highly recommend this hotel...it is great and great location. We were hungry, so we checked in, then went to eat. The concierge recommended a pizza place, so we went there. It was Angelo's and it was great. Then, for some insane reason, we decided to walk around some. We tried to go to Serendipity, but the wait was 2-1/2 hours!! So, walked down to Times Square. On the way, we walked down Park Avenure. We took pictures in Times Square, along with all the other tourists. I would have been concerned about being mugged, except the only people around had nicer cameras than we did. We went to eat some dessert at TGI Fridays where we had a waiter named Abdul who showed us his name tag like he was Vanna White. He had lots of "flair" on his suspenders! We ate our dessert in a comatose state, then walked back to the hotel (decided not to start using the Subway at nighttime) and really fell asleep before we got in bed...we were so tired!!