NYC: days 1 and 2

All that drama the other day began with a 1.5 hour delay in my initial plane flight. I ended up missing my connection and was then reassigned another flight. That flight was delayed and then cancelled. My mate, Simbo did all the heavy thinking and given how sick I was (in the endless queues I was so weak I had sit down and drag my ass like a dog trying to clean its butt). It was 4pm (we'd flown in at 9am and missed our 830am flight to supposedly originally arrive in NYC at 430pm) and the next flight was 11pm that night. We didn't want to wait 7 hours to take a chance that flight might be delayed. Better to come back tomorrow. Even better, our travelling insurance covered our stay that night because of the extensive delay (always read the fine-print kids!).

We did so, and arrived in NYC 24 hours later than we were supposed to. A total of 50 hours from the moment I left the house, to the moment I walked into our hotel room. Our good karma started when we found that we got upgraded. Our apartment is awesome. Three queen size beds, full kitchen, ac, tv and bathroom. It's clean and very, very cool. It's located diagonally opposite Madison Square Garden and it's a 10minute walk to Times Square.

That night we found a reasonably priced steak off Times Square, and fell into bed.

Unusually we were all totally awake by 6am. So we got up and ready.

I had been given a word.doc from a client that was put together by a friend of hers who was a native New Yorker. It listed places to eat and go. we decided to try the closest place called, Florent in the Meat Packing district. A beautiful 15min NY summer's walk later, and we're in a cosy 50's style diner with an incredibly good breakfast deal: bottomless coffee and OJ, eggs, meat (bacon/ham), toast and fries (I had salad) for $8. It's the best we've found so far.

We then milled back to Times Square, checked out some department stores (I scored a pair of rockstar sorta sunglasses) before hopping on the red Grayline double-decker bus tour. This was awesome. We sat up top in the sun and enjoyed the endless trivia about NYC from the tour guide, Peter. He took special delight in pointing out every piece of architecture used in the Spiderman movies. I was especially happy and filled up my camera.

After that we noticed our ticket stub to the tour gave us a discount to the Mariott hotel's Appetizer Buffet, so we headed up there to the rotating restaurant for drinks, unlimited appetizers and a spectacular rotating view.

It was here that our intrepid adventurers parted. I headed home (still sick) while the others headed to the top of the Rockefeller centre. Even though I was the sick one, the other guys hit the hay early while I stayed up and read Timeout (the event guide listing for NYC) to find that apart from some cheap eats, there was nothing interesting inside.

We were on our own...

ps. Sorry no picture. I didn't get time to upload the HEROES images I drew for the con: Claire, Bennet, Sylar and of course, Peter you've already seen.