The Trip to New York - Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is the view from our hotel room at the Riverside Towers at 80th and Riverside Drive in Manhattan -- a very cheap hotel which is clean and has a microwave and fridge but not much else except location, location, location!!!!

Well, we are finally back and exhausted from our trip! Warren seems to have come down with the flu but hopefully I have escaped at least so far but who knows! We were a little nervous about taking Delta instead of Jet Blue but it turned out wonderfully. We had thought that maybe we would be in one of those little jet props as the time to get home was double what is was getting there. But not a problem. They had built in the time we had to wait on the runway for takeoff into the time to get here so even though the flight was less than an hour on a very nice little jet, the wait time was over an hour!! There were 40 planes in line ahead of us on a Saturday night at 8:30!

WOW is all I can say about a week in New York City. Everything is bigger, better and lovelier -- it is just a city of extremes!

We went to four Broadway plays -- Grease, Young Frankenstein, Avenue Q and Chorus Line. We liked Young Frankenstein the best as the staging was unbelievable and the story is such classic Mel Brooks. Avenue Q was a delightful surprise suggested by our oldest daughter. Kind of a marriage between South Park and Sesame Street and laugh out loud funny music -- perfect for the 30 somethings that were brought up on Sesame Street and their parents who watched with them!! Very irreverent to say the least! Grease was okay as it starred the people that were picked on the NBC show. The talent in New York is astounding and many of the subordinates had much better voices than those two leads. I really liked Chorus Line on Broadway but Warren hated it.

Our first two days were spent going to the Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Here is me posing per Warren's request at the Children's Zoo in Central Park. We had just been through our favorite exhibit which is the Rainforest Conservatory where they have all sorts of tropical birds just flying around.


Here are some of the ducks that were outside in the Children's Zoo.

It was beautiful on Monday and the trip to the park was glorious. It is a favorite for both of us. Tuesday the weather was not so cooperative but we spent the day at the Metropolitan. I spent the entire day looking at all the Special Exhibitions and the 19th and 20th Century painters. I took a lot of pictures of art I liked and so will have my very own inspirational book of art. I had forgotten how much I liked Monet and especially van Gogh -- awesome. They have a wonderful collection of the Impressionists and of modern art at the Metropolitan. They had a couple of wonderful special exhibitions as well. I especially liked the Jasper Johns exhibit of grays as well as a private collection of modern works (we couldn't take pictures in those two exhibits).



This is probably one of my two favorites of the van Gogh's at the Museum -- Cypresses. There are two from different angles in the display.




The sunflowers were my very favorite however -- I just loved the colors. I was lucky enough to see the traveling van Gogh exhibition that toured the United States back in 1962 at the Detroit Museum of Art. Unfortunately, you couldn't get far enough away from some of the paintings in that exhibit.



This one is called Red and Yellow Cliffs by Georgia O'Keefe. I really liked this one and it was different from many of hers.






The first of these is by Georges Braque and the second is by Pablo Picasso. They were both done when the men were together in 1911 and there are two others in the Museum as well that were obviously done about the same time. I liked the use of the neutrals. This is at a time in the painters' careers when they were experimenting with the new cubism. Hard to tell them apart!! After seeing all the Picasso paintings, it is obvious that he is a master of his craft as well as being very innovative. His work always seems so perfect to me.