New York For a Day

A friend of mine turned 40 in May and what she wanted to do to celebrate was take a girls outing to New York for a day.  We left early one Saturday morning, drove the 4 hours up, parked, spent a glorious 10 hours in the city and drove back home.  It was seriously such a fun day!  I loved that we did and experienced things that I had never seen or done.

Our day started and ended at Chelsea's Market.  

The fun ladies I spent the day with: Christy Roma, Stacy Sorensen, Heather Gillespie, Debbie Coburn, and Natalie Field.

 We did a 2 hour chocolate walking tour of the city.  The chocolate was amazing, but I honestly loved walking the neighborhoods and areas of Soho and Greenwich we were in. 

 We were taught there is a proper way to "taste" chocolate, similar to wine tasting.  Let it sit on your tongue till it starts to melt and then press it to the roof of your mouth coating it all over the top.  It requires patience I tell you to let a very good piece of chocolate just sit on your tongue!
Stop number one where we ate a piece of dark chocolate and a piece of toffee:

Stop number two was at Magnolia for a chocolate cupcake:

Which also happened to be near the most narrow house in the world.

When we started I didn't think I would have a problem eating all the chocolate samples we were given...until stop number three: a giant chocolate cookie.   All other samples were small and bite size, this cookie did us all in and we weren't sure we could continue eating chocolate.  I'm happy to report that we were all able to persevere!

Stop number four was a Japanese Chocolate store Royce where we sampled a piece of chocolate as well as a chocolate covered potato chip.  I was surprised at how good the Japanese chocolate was...my favorite of the day.

Stop number 5: a chocolate macaroon.  I cannot jump on the macaroon bandwagon, they just aren't my favorite.  I can however appreciate how pretty they look.

Stop number 6: another chocolate store in Greenwich for a taste of milk chocolate and white chocolate.  We were happy that it was the smallest sampling of the day at this point!

The last stop of the tour was at a chocolate store that is famous for including weird items into their chocolate, notably bacon.  Again, not my favorite but I did appreciate the cold water we bought here at the end of our tour.

After the chocolate tour we hoped on the Subway and headed over to walk the Brooklyn Bridge

We ate lunch at the famous pizzeria Juliana's at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge.  It was the best pizza I've ever eaten.  And such an interesting story!  So this guy opened Grimaldi's Pizza and became very well known for his pizza.  He was getting older and wanted to retire so an investor bought him out and Grimaldi would still come in and train the people in the kitchen on how to make the pizza.  Well, they started changing the process, cutting corners and told Grimaldi he wasn't welcome in the kitchen in anymore.  After some time passed and he realized he wasn't happy with pizza in New York he opened a second pizzeria RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the original Grimaldi's under a different name!  So while we didn't eat at the original Grimaldi's, we did eat the original Grimaldi pizza which now happens to be called Juliana after his wife.  

Walking back over the Brooklyn Bridge:

When we walked across we noticed there was someone selling selfie sticks.  Natalie and I, making fun of ourselves the entire time, bought one!  It sure would have come in handy as we walked across the bridge.  We were making so much fun of ourselves!  So for the next two hours there was a group of 40 year old women walking around New York with selfie sticks!  But I do have to say that they were some of our favorite pictures of the day.

Using the selfie at Bryant Park

We ended back at Chelsea Market we we continued the theme of eating and had some delicious street taco's.  

It was such a fun day in a fun city.  We walked 14.4 miles, laughed a lot and had a really great time.  Our one major flaw was staying in the city too long.  At 6:00 when we were finished with the Brooklyn Bridge we should have gone back to the car and headed home.  But who wants to leave New York at 6:00? And at that point we were all doing great.  We didn't end up getting in the car until about 8:30 or 9:00 and we were so so very tired when we pulled back into South Riding Virginia at 1:30 a.m.  Stacy thanks for turning 40!  

**Disclaimer: I know it seems like my blog is much more of a travel log with all these entry's.  We have had a lot on our list of things we wanted to do and see before we move away from the East Coast and I'm trying really hard to get caught up so we don't forget it all!!**