Christmas in New York

It is no secret that we are fond of New York City. It is "the" place to be if you are an artist. I came to the realization recently that I have been to NYC more times than I have been to Boston. One is a 3 hour drive and one is a 45 minute drive, but who knows when we will have the opportunity to enjoy "The City" again in our lives?

In December we embarked on our last NYC adventure of 2008 to see the Rockettes famous Christmas Spectacular. We had tickets to the 9:30PM show, so we decided to spend the night. I found a reasonably priced Holiday Inn Express in Queens near LaGuardia airport. Our trip was perfectly timed at the end of a rough week for Nicholas. Earlier in the week he had turned in the first draft of his thesis, had his final critique for is studio class and turned in a paper for another class. It was a blessing to spend some much needed quality time together.

We checked into our hotel, and were very pleased. It had been recently renovated. The view from our window was "The Projects," and the nearest subway stop was about 2 miles away. Luckily our hotel provided a free shuttle to the subway, and picked us up when we came back from Manhattan. I highly recommend them as a reasonably priced (AKA: not $400/night in Times Square), clean place to lay your head at night. Complimentary breakfast is always nice, too.

We rode the purple line into Manhattan on Friday evening. We had decided to just walk around and enjoy the Christmas lights. The tree in Rockefeller Center had been lit for 2 days, and I was anxious to see it in all its glory. It was pretty cold, so we enjoyed stopping in at a little sushi place for dinner. They brought us hot washcloths to warm our hands when we walked in! Dinner was yummy, and we continued to make our way to Rockefeller Center.

There were a ton of people there taking pictures of the tree and ice skating. The tree was enormous and beautiful. We were very pleased with the wonderful pictures we were able to take. We decided to move along to Radio City Music Hall and maybe enjoy the lounge areas before our show. We found, as we arrived more than hour before our show, that people were making a line. Nicholas thought it was absurd that we should stand in line when we already had tickets (and assigned seats). Nonetheless, we were happy that we got in line when we did because it went around the block.

We finally got inside around 9PM. Nicholas was "randomly" searched on our way in. We decided to forgo the $10 drinks and made our way to our seats to enjoy some pre show music. The chandelier has 10,000 Swavorski crystal snowflake ornaments on it. We had taken a tour of Radio City Music Hall in March, and our tour guide had raved about the Christmas Spectacular Show. We really enjoyed the show and Christmas in New York!