Beautiful morning for a flight!

We arrived at the Renaissance in Times Square about 10:30 and our room wasn’t ready, so we checked our bags and walked towards Central Park.

We went to The Museum of Art and Design and took a guided tour of the highlights. One floor featured paper dresses which were popular in the 1960’s. It turns out that Asheville was one of the largest producers of them. Who knew?

We stopped for lunch and I got a sushi burger. It had tuna between 2 rice “patties”. \240It was a little hard to eat, but really good!

We have a corner room with 2 balconies overlooking Times Square.

After resting awhile we went for an early dinner, then we went to see Book of Mormon.

The show was really funny and had great music although was a little raunchy at times.

Times Square at night from our balcony

Shucked was Hilarious! \240The humor was silly and a lot cleaner than Book of Mormon.

After the show, we walked to TKTS in Times Square and got discounted tickets to see a matinee tomorrow of & Juliet. \240It’s another new musical that is supposed to be good.

Tonight Tom planned a dinner that was an “experience”. \240We went to Journey and it was quite a show! Tom always finds the most unique places!

Our name projected at our seat

We sat with 6 other people and enjoyed their company. Tom was the only male. There were two 14 year old girls from Boston with their mothers. The girls had planned the entire weekend with experiences they found on Tic Toc.

The menu for our trip

We were supposed to be in a Zeppelin riding to different places in the world.

Before we left we could paint graffiti on the walls using our phones.

Going to the top of \240the Empire State Building

Tuna and Crab Terrine

In the Amazon

Amazonian Forest Greens

Under the Sea

Grilled Octopus

The Arctic.

Faroe Island Salmon

In a volcano

Braised Short Ribs

Outer Space

Cheese Cake

One of the other guests was also celebrating a birthday and they brought us champagne to celebrate.

Hillsong Church

The street festival from yesterday was moved a bock over to the street in front of our hotel today. We had a great view looking down on the sea of people which was a great place to be! It was a lot less crowded yesterday morning when we went.

We got late checkout and after lunch we checked our bags and walked to our 3rd show &Juliet.

The show was about William Shakespeare’s wife wanting him to change the ending of Romeo and Juliet so she didn’t kill herself. It had some great singers!

If I had to choose my favorite show, it would be Shucked. I think Tom Liked Book of Mormon a little better. All of the shows had some amazing talent!

The balcony of our room

The Renaissance was a great location for going to shows. We walked to them all. If we weren’t doing shows, I think we’d rather stay in a different part of the city than Times Square. The amount of people was unbelievable!

We are staying at the Marriott at the airport tonight. There have been storms around here all day, but we never got rain in the city until we were leaving. Apparently Newark has canceled a lot of flights including the afternoon flight from Asheville and the evening flight to Asheville. We’ll see what happens tomorrow morning with our flight.

My birthday gift at the Asheville airport!

We had a pretty uneventful day of traveling. Besides having to switch gates 4 times and being delayed about 45 minutes, everything went smoothly. As we well know when traveling through Newark, things could have been much worse!

My birthday wouldn’t have been complete without celebrating with our great friends the Vanderkwaaks, Strouds, and Deans.

I have felt truly blessed during my 60 years to have had wonderful family, friends, and good health.

Thanks to Tom for making my birthday so special.