NYC Trip!

This was our version of Spring Break, seeing as how BYU doesn't actually have a spring break. James finished Winter semester last week, and starts Spring semester tomorrow, so we took five days and went to Manhattan--one of my favoritest places EVER! =)

Our flight left around 6am on Thursday...which means we were up at 3 o'clock in the morning. Blech. But up we got, and everything went smoothly for our travels. [Funny story--since we're going on our honeymoon cruise in August and I didn't want to pay to get my name changed on my passport (which is just as expensive as getting a whole new passport) we left my driver's license in my maiden name, until after the cruise. So all my tickets and everything had me listed as Valerie Mechling, rather than Valerie Holley. So apparently I am James' mistress. At least when we're traveling.] We laid over in Denver, and arrived in NYC just after 2pm. What with baggage claim and a taxi ride from LaGuardia to Manhattan, it was after 3 by the time we got to our hotel: Dream New York.

We chillaxed at the hotel for a few hours before heading down to Times Square that evening. The weather was beautiful throughout our stay in NYC, and Thursday evening was no exception.

That night we spent on Broadway, where we saw The Phantom of the Opera. This is James' favorite show, thus we were both very excited!

Phantom was truly amazing. The orchestra, the singing, the staging, the effects, all of it was fantastic. Of course, I saw Phantom a few years ago when I went to NYC with my parents. But it was delightful to see it with James, who enjoyed it so thoroughly. It was great!

On Friday we went on a double-decker bus tour of lower Manhattan. It's about as touristy as you can get, and we ate it up.

We chose a hop-on-hop-off tour, so we could stop and see a few places we were most interested in, the first of which was the Empire State Building. We forked over the money to ascend 86 stories and revel in a 360-degree view of Manhattan. So worth it! Incredible.

After the Empire State Building, we rode the bus south through Manhattan, taking in SoHo, Greenwich Village, and other sights. We next got off at the World Trade Center, where we got passes to visit the 9/11 Memorial.

I described the feel of the 9/11 Memorial to Sam and Ashley as similar to war memorials I have visited. While there were still city sounds, and conversation at the memorial, the people there were mostly respectful and reflective.

James and I spent some time taking in the pools, in the footprints of the twin towers, and the Survivor Tree.

After the Memorial, we finished our bus tour, taking in the wealthy neighborhoods of the upper east side, Central Park, the shops of 5th Avenue, and more, before returning to our hotel.

We borrowed a little griddle from my mother to take with us, and did some shopping on Thursday at a local drugstore for groceries. Over the course of our vacation, we ate out a few times, but many of our meals we cooked in our hotel room. It saved us quite a bit of money! So after our bus tour, we made a little supper in our room while we prepared for our evening outing.

Friday night we visited the Manhattan LDS Temple for an endowment session. Of course, we stopped for a minute to take pictures. =)

The temple was beautiful, inside and out, and we really enjoyed the session. It was interesting, because of the eight or nine couples present, at least half of them seemed to know each other. Small world!

After the session, we stopped at a street cafe and enjoyed a banana split. Date night!

Saturday morning we dorked around for awhile. We ended up back on Times Square (tourist trap!), where we visited several stores, including M&M World, which is MASSIVE. It's three stories full of M&M merchandise: toys, clothes, accessories, housewares, games, and of course, M&Ms.

We then went to the matinee performance of Wicked. I was absurdly, ridiculously excited:

James didn't really know much about Wicked, sans a basic premise. Afterward, he told me it was sillier than he expected. =) Nonetheless, he enjoyed himself, though probably not as much as I did!

We had predetermined that while in NYC, we would go out to one nice dinner, and Saturday night was the night. We had a hard time deciding where to eat, which resulted in us wandering around for a long time looking for a likely place, before we ended up back at the hotel to look up a good place. We settled on a Japanese restaurant called Mr. Robota.

James had skirt steak, I had braised pork belly. Both were divine--but mine was the best, we concurred. A-may-zing. Truly delightful. And great ambiance, too. We left very happy.

Sunday we spent some time in Central Park, which was lovely. The weather was absolutely perfect, first of all, and there was also just this great feeling of R&R about the place. We paused for awhile under a tree, and ended up watching a community softball game, just for the heck of it.

After crossing Central Park, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of my top-favorite places that I visited with my parents. Before going in, we stopped and enjoyed frozen yogurt and fruit on the steps of the Met.

The Met reportedly has over 1 million pieces of art--which I believe. It's enormous. We were there for less than five hours, and we didn't even walk through the whole museum, let alone seeing half of what they have there.

James was kind enough to humor me while I spent a great deal of time in the 18th-19th century European paintings (Vincent Van Gogh? Yes, please.) We both enjoyed the Arms & Armor, as well as the wing dedicated to Musical Instruments from around the world. I could spend days in this museum, happily.

After the museum closed, we took a looooooooooong walk down Lexington Avenue, slowly working our way back to our hotel. We had some New York pizza that night, and then spent several hours watching the Food Network in our hotel, just for fun. =)

Then we were up early on Monday to travel home! We had a layover in Houston, then finally made it home--just in time to head to the Holley's to celebrate our brother Patrick's birthday. It was a busy day, but a good one.

All in all, a FABULOUS trip. I've officially decided that traveling with my dear James is the best. Like, THE. BEST. Holleys for the win. =)

Life is good!

Last week was Spring Break at the studio. While James still had school, this still opened up a lot of free time for us both--of which we took full advantage!

On Monday we went for another test flight at the Discovery Space Center in American Fork. These test flights help the flight directors figure out what's working and what's not working, with regards to the controls as well as the stories. Unfortunately, this test flight wasn't nearly as exciting as our last one. But we still enjoyed the company!

That day, I also embarked on Camp NaNoWriMo. This is a 30-day writing challenge hosted by National Novel Writing Month. I am attempting to write 30,000 words of the third book in our trilogy, between April 1 and April 30. It's been slow going thus far, though I have been making steady progress. Goals always help me stay focused better, so I took on the challenge.

For family home evening that night, we put together our 72-hour kit. It's something I've wanted to have for awhile, and especially now that we're married, I wanted to have what was needed for both of us. I looked at a couple of different websites for ideas of what to put in our kit. For example, we did not put any bedding or things like that into our kit, although we did figure out a method for carrying our sleeping bags if we did happen to need them. We looked around at some water filtration options, but didn't find anything we liked within our budget. So we are storing 3 gallons of water alongside our kit, and going from there for now. We did include one spare set of clothing and undergarments, including socks. This is in addition to food, first aid, and other general supplies we pulled from the lists' suggestions. I felt a lot better about life once we had it all put together.

Tuesday was temple day. James got out of school at 2pm, and we drove up to the Draper Temple for a session. James had never been to Draper, and we both found it to be lovely. The woodwork in this temple is particularly beautiful. It was nice to have extra time to spend. Many of our temple trips are on a pretty tight schedule, stuffed in between school and the studio. Being on Spring Break allowed us to linger in the Celestial Room, which is always a powerful experience. Afterward we headed to Carrabba's for dinner. It's a personal favorite of ours, with several important occasions having taken place there.

That evening we took my ring in to get 're-dipped', a process that we were encouraged to have done every six months. Basically they recoat the metal of my engagement ring to make it all shiny again, as well as cleaning the whole thing. Unfortunately, this meant parting with my ring for two days, and after about ten minutes, I thought I was going to lose my mind. (I've gotten VERY accustomed to wearing it!) So James, dear that he is, bought me a substitute ring to wear while mine was gone. However, I'll tell you--totally worth it! My ring was SO much brighter when we got it back. I couldn't believe how much more the diamonds sparkled. We were very impressed.

On Friday, I donated blood--finally. I had attempted to donate blood alongside James several weeks ago, but was turned down due to my low hemoglobin. I was pleased to be accepted for donation this time around. However, my visit resulted in a rather terrible bruise on my arm! This is my bruise, six days later.

My students yesterday decided that I must have been battling with elephants! Of course, my boss (tongue-in-cheek) asked if my husband was abusing me. Either way, it's a pretty impressive bruise for a relatively low-key blood draw.

Over the weekend, James and I watched General Conference. To my surprise, my mother-in-law offered us her tickets to the Sunday morning session. I was delighted! For having lived in Utah pretty much my whole life, I have never actually attended a session of General Conference in the Conference Center. And it was lovely, sans the ticket-beggers and protesters (the former actually bothered me more than the latter, strangely enough). I was glad we got to attend Sunday morning in particular, because I have always loved listening to Music & the Spoken Word prior to that session, and it was even better live. So so so wonderful--as was conference as a whole! I felt spiritually recharged.

On Tuesday night, I decided to reenact one of my favorite childhood memories. Throughout my growing-up years, my mother would periodically make homemade pizza, which was almost always accompanied by homemade cinnamon rolls. I loved this meal, and on Tuesday I succumbed to a hankering for it. Thank goodness for a patient husband! We didn't eat until about 11:30pm that night. But I think he will agree that it was totally worth it! The pizza turned out great, as did the cinnamon rolls that followed! All from scratch.

This weekend, we are headed to Arches National Park for a little camping trip. This is our "spring break" getaway, and our first camping trip together. It's also our first chance to use the sleeping bags and tent that James' mother gave him for his birthday. We're super excited!

Life is good!