A long day's walking

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Clay started a movie on TV last night, Hangover III. He promptly went to sleep. I stayed up and laughed myself silly. They were outside on Central Park South setting up bleachers across the street for the parade until at least midnight. I fell asleep before the noise stopped. We slept in this morning as we had no where to be early today. I wanted to go to the Guggenheim and after 3pm go see the parade balloons being inflated. Clay was up first about 12 hours after he'd gone to bed and that woke me up. He went down the hall to get ice, then he went downstairs to the restaurant in the lobby to get me a complimentary coffee. After that he went across 58th and around 6th to go to Merci Market for breakfast. He had a bagel and cream cheese and brought me a yogurt.

We set out towards Central Park about 10am. We walked paths and trails and stopped at the Dairy Visitor Center, the ice skating rink, the Balto statue, the Alice in Wonderland statue, Cleopatra's Needle and came out on 5th Avenue past the Met. The Guggenheim opened today after 10am so we got there about an hour later. We passed the Neue Gallery on the way and saw their banners that they were currently showing Klimt. We were excited but when we went back found that they are closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. So, we missed that. But we really enjoyed the Guggenheim. The building is by Frank Lloyd Wright and it was as special as the art displayed. We ate at the restaurant there sometime after 1pm. We ate light not because we were starving but because we needed to sit somewhere for an hour or so! It was good and because we had made a gift shop purchase and had the receipt we got a 10% discount.

Now knowing what we know now, I can't say that we'd have crossed the park headed to Columbus Ave and 79th. But we didn't know and off we went. We headed for the 79th St entrance because I wanted to see the Belvedere Castle in the park. We went in and all the way up inside. It was crowded but nothing like what was coming! We exited through the Ramble and started seeing detour signs. Then crowds and crowds of people trying to get out of the park. But the paths and roads and entrances and exits were closed. We wandered back and forth for maybe an hour with Trolls balloons in sight next to the Natural History Museum but no way to get there. We had to walk over a mile, maybe 2, by the time we got inside the viewing area with a million or so other people. I'm only counting the ones who touched me not everyone I could see. There were only about 2 dozen balloons and Snoopy and Kermit have evidently been fired. So it wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped. If we could have backed out we might have but I have to say we worked almost as hard to get away as we did to get there. I was fully dark by the time we had walked maybe 3 or 4 blocks in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go. We had planned to return to the Plaza Food Hall to eat at the Chinese place where we couldn't get seats yesterday at lunch. We were both beat and had to use the bathroom by now so we got a taxi. Traffic was a nightmare but at least we were headed away from the parade balloon madness. As I told Clay, it is done and I'm glad we did it though I wouldn't recommend it! If we had known what to expect, I expect we wouldn't have done it.

We got to the Food Hall after 5pm. We got seats in a nearly empty Chinese place and both had rice bowls instead of noodles or dumplings.. It was a bit of a disappointment. I had chicken and Clay had salmon. Maybe noodles or dumpling would have been better, but I liked the crepe place better. After that we detoured over to Merci Market to stock up for tomorrow since we have plans for a lazy day in the room watching the parade from our extraordinarily expensive parade view room. We bought enough for breakfast and lunch, we hope. Clay said he might want to go out in the afternoon, but I am not sure what would be open then. We'll see. We made reservations for the Essex House Thanksgiving buffet at 5pm tomorrow per recommendations of the hotel. They wanted $125pp for it and we paid it. We do not have high expectations and may wish tomorrow that we'd done some research for something more reasonable, but we were concerned about crowds and bad weather and this was definitely the easiest thing which we assumed would make it worth the extra expense. We'll see.

It has been a long, exhausting day so I'm going to put my feet up now and give thanks!

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