Third Full Day in NYC

We enjoyed another morning sleeping in until 9:30ish, then walked down to Jamba Juice at the corner. Thank goodness for breakfast at Jamba Juice (steel cut oatmeal with fresh banana slices on top and fresh squeezed orange juice) because our eating kind of went downhill from there. We sort of went the junk food route. (Yeah, I know - this kind of junk food really isn't junk food; great ingredients are used. We just didn't really have anything fresh and were definitely lacking the veggies this day.) I had really wanted to make it to a raw food restaurant today, and I'm not sure what happened with that. Anyway...we walked to the corner of Lexington and 55th where they were supposed to be filming the television series, The Good Wife. How do I know these things? There are websites, such as onlocationvacations.com that tell you what things are filming in different cities each day. Silly or not, it's just one of my fun things I like to see and do.This advertisement was somewhere else in town; I'm just posting it to tell this story. There didn't seem to be any "action" going on other than setting up lighting, etc., then Julianna Margulies (you know, Carol from ER) walked by us. She had curlers in her hair and was holding a small child. We did another loop around the block, and then Josh Charles (you know, Knox Overstreet from Dead Poet's Society) went by. He was just walking down the sidewalk, and he gave us a big smile. Probably because my eyes were opened so wide from thinking "That's Knox Overstreet!"

Next, we took the subway up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I didn't realize it would be quite so large. We spent a couple of hours looking around, but clearly there was no way to see everything in that amount of time. And there was so much I'd rather wait and look at with the kids one day.

I tried to take pictures of paintings of artists the kids know about, such as Andy Warhol's of Mao Zedong (in the background). And there is this artist, Chuck Close. The paintings that completely look like photographs amaze me. It freaks me out.

We really enjoyed the modern art rooms, filled with paintings by artists such as Picasso,

and

and

and

You know, just a few people like that.

For lunch, we picked up two pieces of pizza at Viva Herbal Pizzeria in the East Village. I'd never had anything like the Picante Pizza on the right. They were both good.

Went back to Lulu's Sweet Apothecary...since we were "in the neighborhood" and all. We shared a banana split made with scoops of peanut butter and jelly, banana cream pie (oh, my gosh!), and toffee-something flavors topped with hot fudge and pineapple sauce, coconut whipped cream, and a cherry on top. I love the details in this place, such as they use my kind of cherries without the red food dye. I wasn't going to add this embarrassing fact, but we got another twist cone to go. It's important to mention, though, for two stories. One, as I was walking out, the entire ice cream top fell off the cone, and as it was falling through the air, Ryan quickly swooped his hand and caught it, saving the day. But then, as we stood there, laughing, with chocolate rolling down both of our hands, (story #2) we suddenly felt sick with ourselves...what were we doing? A banana split then something else to go...we were embarrassed by our glutony. It's like I don't have enough of a weight problem as it is.

Our next little venture was the mile walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. The walking path is up above the highway, and we enjoyed our little jaunt. I was, however, a little sore from walking all day, and my jaunt was a little bit of a limp. When we were standing in the middle, taking a little rest, Ryan whispered that the guy sitting a few feet away from us was Julia Robert's husband (Danny Moder), and he was with their twins. (I sort of looked at Ryan crazy that he picked up on something like that before I did.) They ended up being in the background of a couple of pictures, but of course, I'm not going to post them because that would make me as bad as the paparazzi.

We hadn't had a chance to swim in our rooftop pool so we did that next. You can walk outside the enclosed pool area and go up another level of stairs to the actual rooftop, and it has an amazing view. We never had a chance to go up there after dark because it closes at 10:45, but I would have liked to.That night, we ended up in Brooklyn again and met up with another Ryan, who was a friend of mine from highschool; I hadn't seen him since college. He ate with us at Foodswings, a vegan fast food joint. I forgot to take a picture of our cheese fries, tofu "fish" stix, and philly cheese "steak" sandwich. It was fun to see a familiar face in the city and fun to get a feel of a different area in Brooklyn.

It was pretty late, but we hated to get in too early since it was our last night. I remembered that vegan doughnuts were supposedly delivered on Tuesday nights to a place, Atlas Cafe and Bakery, in the East Village so we took a little side trip. (My complaint about the subway system is there are no subways in a big portion of the east side, which is too bad because that is where a large number of vegetarian places are. It always requires a lot of extra walking. Which is usually fine, but my feet were really hurting at this point.) Atlas isn't entirely vegetarian, but their dessert case was AMAZING. They get most (all probably) of their desserts from Vegan Treats, a place in Pennsylvania, whose website I've looked at, just for the fun of it, many times before. My purpose was to buy some doughnuts to take home for the kids. (I first called American Airlines from the Cafe to make sure I could carry them on. They said as long as they weren't jelly or cream filled - funny.) It was really hard, though, to pass up all of these BEAUTIFUL desserts...so we ordered a piece of peanut butter cheesecake to share. My camera battery was dead at this point, but it had chocolate frosting on top with these large balls of peanut butter and good grief, so much other stuff going on you wouldn't believe. We could barely finish it. I told you we did not behave very well, food-wise, today. Oh, well - it was our last restaurant visit on this trip. Sigh.