Travel Tips

The National Association of Art Educators convention was my first opportunity to mix business with pleasure in New York. Six nights to check some things out and get some work done too.

Bar 89, also in SoHo, is often mentioned because of its unique bathrooms- the doors fog up when you click the latch, solving the question of how you are going to have any privacy. It’s a gimmick but heck, it’s functional. This is where we decided to get some food in our systems to go along with the next round of drinks. I had decided to keep this a beer night so it mattered a lot less to me where we went but Jeannine and Valerie were experimenting a bit and Bar 89 does make a very good Camparie (sp?!)

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We wound up at Absolutely 4th back in the Village. I like it very much. Intimate but not small, good drinks and a no rush type of service. I think a good place to end an evening. Had we ended it there we would have been better of had we ended it all there but we stayed up much too late at our apartment. A fine evening but I’d be paying for it the next day.

Indeed the length of the previous night’s activities took its toll on this day. I muddled through the show and headed home on the F with strong intentions of staying in. What to do for dinner then? Ray’s Pizza was the answer. A fine Sicilian Pie and the television was all the adventure that would be had that night.

The thing about Ray’s is that there are several of them but only one is the real deal. You’ll find pizza joints throughout the city named Ray’s but the one in the Village is the one to visit.

I had to work this day so I missed the famous (some say infamous) St. Patrick's day parade. When I got home we decided to do something radical for NYC- COOK! Actually my wife loves to cook and about the only time she orders in is when I'm in town, something that baffles many of our NY friends. Pasta and a good bottle of wine were the menu and was a fine way to spend our Saturday night.

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The Sixth Night

Brunch is always a good way to spend part of a Sunday so we met our friends Rick and Deborah. We intended to eat at Good, which has received very positive ratings but there was a pretty long wait. When I asked the host how long the wait would be he said to me (I'm not making this up!) "I have no idea, my mind is really somewhere else right now." Well…one of the more interesting responses I've received what I thought was a pretty routine question.

So we bagged Good and instead went to Elephant & Castle where we walked right in to a table. I wouldn't say it set my world on fire but it was pleasant enough and the company was good.

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It was a really sunny day but the *@#?! wind came up something fierce so Jeannine and I bagged our planned window shopping and holed up in the apartment for some serious television watching with the cats. It’s true, one of our cats, Jinks, is addicted to television. Frankly Felix (the big one) couldn’t care less but Jinks will watch most anything. I never thought I’d have to monitor the TV habits of a pet!

Once the wind died down a bit we made it out for a bit of shopping, hitting the sales racks at Filene’s Basement and the like and then called it a day.

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The First Night

As usual I took flight 848 from LAX to JFK. Traveling east always shoots the day traveling! You leave at 9:00 a.m. and don't arrive until after 5 in New York. Fortunately the cab line was short so I was soon on my way to our apartment.

Jeannine and I always order Sung Chu Mei the first night I am in town. It's where we went the first time I came to visit, we liked it and decided to make it a tradition. I'm sure its not the best Chinese in Manhattan or even in the Village, but it is good, the delivery is fast and the food's still hot when it arrives.

I've gotten pretty good at changing time zones but on this trip I was travel weary so not long after dinner, I was out for the count.

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Heading Home

I always take the same flight from NYC to LA- United Flight 21. It leaves JFK at 9:15 p.m. and arrives at LAX just after mid-night. It makes for a late night but I like it because it gives me an extra day in the city (I can head for the airport around 7:15 and have plenty of time). The flight is rarely full so there is room to spread out and since I always take the same flight I’ve made some friends at JFK that treat me well. Leaving is always a weird thing since it means Jeannine and I are apart again but, it’s and adventure!

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The Second Night

Up and into the mix with the commuter crowd as I took the “F” train from the Village up to mid Town and the Hilton, my business home away from home for the rest of the week. I take the Subway “just enough to be dangerous” and this was my first time on one of the “letter” trains. Fortunately for me our apartment is down the street from one of the 14th Street Station entrances so after a series of up and down stair ways, a couple of long corridors and a missed turn, I made it and arrived a few minutes later at my destination.

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The Hilton is on the corner of 6th Avenue and 53rd

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Here's my "office" for the week

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I don’t even have a clue about how many bars are in our neighborhood let alone the whole city so there are always new watering holes to discover. This night we headed first to Chow Bar for a drink. Nothing remarkable but a cool interior and decent service.

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Then it was on to Sushi Samba. There are two locations; we chose the new one on 7th. It was here that I learned an important lesson about ordering sushi in NYC. Unlike California (or anywhere else I’ve been), an “order” of let’s say, fresh water eel is one piece. This lack of local knowledge resulted in Jeannine and I doubling our dinner items when the first plate arrived with about half of what we expected to see on it. The food was very good. A nice blend of traditional Japanese food with South American influences worked in. Their Sake menu was also impressive.

When Jeannine and I moved part of our lives to NYC, we shipped everything UPS ground. This turned out to be a monumental mistakes as boxes were lost, damaged and otherwise a disaster! So when I found out that my office had not sent the boxes for the convention by air but rather by ground, I had a sinking feeling that I was in for a long week (turns out I was very right). Otherwise the show went well.

I not exactly sure what the definition of a pub crawl is as it relates to the number of bars that must be visited in order to call it a crawl but if three qualifies (I think it doesn’t) then this night was the closet thing to a crawl that I had done in a long time. With our friend Valerie and her brother Jay, we first tired Idyllwild, a bar set up like an airplane terminal lounge, and thus a natural draw for me. It wasn’t open yet though so we instead made our way to Sweet and Vicious in SoHo. This was a good choice to start the evening. Dark without feeling cave like, there was room to spread out and plot our next move.