New York

Just coming off the best New York trip of my life. Chinatown, SoHo, the tallest brownstones in the country, walking with pizzas, street vendors, seeing FredArmisen cross the street, wishing I would've shouted, "Put a bird on it!," but he had already passed by.

I walked more than I ever walkedon any vacation in my life.

The World Hotel, located in Chinatown is the best worst hotel in New York, I'm convinced.

Cafe Habana was exactly how I remembered it----opened doors, small formica tables, and relaxed/effortlessly cool people, coming down for a bite between chapters of their novel, or blog entry.

On the first sunny day on any New York Trip, you must go to SoHo. The large, historic, brick buildings swallow you up, and the retail (which includes street vendors) are an inviting, beautiful, stuffy mess compared to the more reserved Greenwich Village or business-only upper Manhattan.

As I said, our trip consist

ed of walking---a lot of walking. One day we strolled from 2nd Street to 51st, with a brunch stop at Vesellca), a boutique in St. Marks, and a shoe repair where I bought $2.00 laces for

my SeaVees and almost purchased a pair of ZigZigs (high top Bohemian shoes), but decided not to after trying them on.

MOMA was modern, The Met was thorough (Alexander McQueen, wow), and The Guggenheim was a concentrated look at Cubism from 1909 to 1915 (Did you know that many artists of this time would date their work earlier then its creation, so the artist could claim they invented Cubism?).

Guggenheim was difficult to get to though. Not because I still don't have a smart phone, but getting to Guggenheim meant leaving the Central Park grass.

Central Park is big, but if you ever go on a sunny weekend day, find the spot where everyone is at, laying down, playing frisbee, dancing without music.

Laying, there in the grass, you want to think about life, how the moments, the vacations made for times like this, when you are sitting back as the world around you is sitting back as well, when someone may take a random photo of you, and that photo will end up in an antique store 60 years later, and patrons will look at it and say, "wow, it was so nice back then."