For details on our first day in New York, check out this post. Now for day 2.

We woke up exhausted again, having each only slept a total of about 9 hours over the past two nights. We had breakfast at the hotel, then we caught a cab to Walgreens (for some medicine for my sinus infection) and then over to the Brooklyn Bridge. When we were originally planning our trip, we hadn’t even thought of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge until my little brother mentioned that it was one of the highlights of his recent New York trip. So we walked across the bridge, and it was pretty amazing. It gives a great view of the city, and there’s something really cool about walking across such a historical bridge. I am consistently amazed at the things people were able to do so long ago, like build bridges that would last for centuries. (I’m often amazed that I made it through high school without the Internet — seriously, how did people write papers before the Internet? Did I really used to have to go to the library to do research? Weird!) So walking across this huge, sturdy, amazing bridge was a pretty cool experience.

Once we got across the bridge, we took the subway over to the Empire State Building. That was one of those things that we felt like we had to do, being tourists in New York and all. It’s not that we didn’t WANT to pay $42 to go stand up on a really tall building, but if the building wasn’t so famous, we probably would have skipped it. But we did it, and it was cool. We were glad we left so early in the morning, because we got up to the top without ever having to stand in a line (thanks to my cousin’s advice to buy the tickets online in advance), but by the time we got down less than an hour later, the line looked to be at least an hour long. And now, if we’re ever playing a game where you lose if you’ve never been to the Empire State Building, we totally won’t lose!

After the Empire State Building, we headed back over to Times Square. We weren’t really sure of our plan for the rest of the day; it was only 10:00 a.m., but we were supposed to meet Nathan and Devin at the ferry at 1:30 to go see the Statue of Liberty. But we knew we needed to get back to Times Square, because the Whoppers t-shirt we had bought for Beth at the Hershey’s store didn’t fit, so we needed to exchange it. (Of course, we discovered when we got back to Utah that the large is apparently the same size as the medium, because it doesn’t fit either. Whatever, Whoppers.)

About a block before we got to the Hershey’s store, we had the experience of a lifetime. We were walking along, and suddenly this black dude handed me a CD and said, “Check out my new CD!” The CD was in my hand before I could say anything, so I figured I’d just be polite and take his little sample and throw it away once I was out of sight. Oh, but it wasn’t a sample. He GIVES me the CD, and then he says, “Any donation you can find it in your heart to give is great.” So it’s a trick! They give you the CD (autographing it as they hand it to you), and then they guilt you into paying for it! And he had two buddies, and they both have CDs too, and they’re both autographing them and handing them to us, and one of the guys calls Bethy “Babycakes” and then signs the CD “To Babycakes,” and I already gave their buddy $14 (which is $19 more than I thought he deserved), and it’s like they can smell the fact that I only have twenty dollar bills left, and I get confused and disoriented, and next thing I know, I’ve paid $34 for three CDs I don’t want, including one that is signed flirtatiously to my wife! The original guy says, “Take these back and make me the $%*&%$ in Salt Lake City!” Well yeah, dude! I paid $34 for your CDs — the only way I’m getting my money’s worth is if I make you the $%*&%$! Otherwise, I just paid $34 for three CDs I will never ever listen to, and that would just be stupid!

After exchanging the malfitting t-shirt for the other malfitting t-shirt, we decided to get some lunch. We figured we might as well get some real, authentic New York Italian cuisine, so we finally settled on this quaint little place called…

… “Olive Garden.” Doesn’t the name just scream “authentic”? In our defense, the only three restaurants we could see were Planet Hollywood, the Hard Rock Cafe, and Olive Garden, so since authentic wasn’t an option, we went with “familiar.”

As we ate our lunch, we lamented the fact that no one had yet called on our Craigslist ad for our “Wicked” tickets. Then we remembered that there was a showing at 2:00, so we decided to head over to the theater and see if there were any people who tried unsuccessfully to get tickets to that show and might want to buy our 8:00 tickets. Once we got there, Bethy had an even better idea: what if we could trade tickets with someone? Then we could see “Wicked” AND get to the Yankee game! That wife of mine, she’s one smart cookie. So our hearts got set pretty quickly on seeing the 2:00 show — we really had been bummed at having to choose between “Wicked” and the Yankee game. All we had to do now was find someone in the next two hours who wanted to trade tickets with us. Our seats for the evening show were really good, and I had high hopes that someone would trade us their lousy tickets for our great ones.

So I made a sign…

…and I stood there holding my sign…

…and I made edits to my sign and offered our tickets AND cash and even held $40 in cash in my hand along with the sign…

…and I had absolutely no luck. At about 1:50, a scalper named Mel offered me two seats that weren’t together for my tickets and $100. I politely told him he was an idiot. Five minutes later, he said “Your tickets and $40.” Now, I had been prepared to give someone my tickets and $40, but that was for tickets together, and that was to someone who wasn’t a slimeball. Mel tried to convince me that he was doing ME a favor taking the tickets off my hands, but I explained to him that a) my tickets were still good for another six hours, while his were good for five more minutes; and b) my tickets, being great seats and two seats together, were significantly more valuable than his lousy, separate seats. I told him I would give him $20 and my tickets, and he said, “Man, I gotta make some money!” I said, “That’s why I’m giving you my two very valuable tickets!” He walked away muttering under his breath. At 2:01, he came back to me and said, “Okay, twenty dollars!” My first instinct was to tell him I would trade straight up with no cash, but since the show was already starting, I gave him the money and took the tickets, and Bethy and I ran inside the theater.

The show was worth every penny of the $420 we paid for it ($442 if you count the $22 we paid for the tickets to the Statue of Liberty that we didn’t use — or $476 if you can find some way to factor in the $34 on rap CDs)! We both absolutely loved the story, the music, the aura, everything. Even without getting to sit together, we both agreed that seeing “Wicked” was worth the trip all by itself. We were SO glad we skipped the Statue of Liberty, which would have been another one of those touristy obligation trips (but seriously, don’t tell my mother-in-law that I said that). Just awesome.

So we left the Wicked theater and headed up to the Bronx. By happy accident, we ended up on the D train, which runs the same route as the B train we had taken to Yankee Stadium the day before, but it didn’t make nearly as many stops. So within 20 minutes of walking out of Wicked, we were standing at the Stadium waiting for the gates to open.

Actually seeing a game at Yankee Stadium was amazing. As much as I felt at home there the day before, I felt it even more being there two days in a row. I got to see one of my favorite players, Alex Rodriguez, only the second time I have ever seen him play in person. (The last time was September 19, 1998, when he was playing for the Mariners and they were playing the Angels in Anaheim. In that game, he hit his 40th homer of the season to become only the second player in history to have 40 homers and 40 stolen bases in the same season.) The field looked great without the tarp on it, and the stadium was all sorts of historical and ambiance-ish again.

Another after-effect of spending four hours in Yankee Stadium on Friday is that we didn’t feel the need to stay for the whole game. Since we didn’t really care who won the game (it only mattered to the Rays, and we sure don’t care about them), we watched the game until we felt like we’d had the full experience, and then we left after five innings. We definitely would have stayed for the whole game on Friday night, but we had a plane leaving at 7:00 Sunday morning (which meant we had to be up by about 4:30), so we didn’t feel like getting back to the hotel at 1:00. So we left early and got back to the hotel around 10:00.

And that’s about it. We ordered some more Papa John’s at the hotel, went to bed, got up way too early, slept most of the flight back to Utah, picked up our kids at Emily’s house, and then went to church and tried to stay awake. It was a whirlwind trip, with more excitement packed into two days than we usually have in a month. And while it was probably the most expensive 60 hours we’ve had in our marriage, it was absolutely worth every penny.

In closing, here is something I wrote on my weight-loss blog:

By the way, I could totally see myself living in New York. Not forever, and probably not if I had a stupid job I had to go to, but when I am wealthily retired, I would LOVE to live for a year or two in Manhattan, and just spend my time going to Broadway shows, using my season tickets to the New Yankee Stadium, and learning how to spit. It is a wonderful city where no one obeys traffic signals, random black dudes shove their hardcore rap CDs into your hands and then ask for donations (all the while flirting with your wife and signing her CD “To Babycakes”) even though they totally KNOW you’re a white dude from Utah, and crazy cowboys run around playing guitar in nothing but briefs and a cowboy hat.

That pretty much sums up my feelings for that wonderful, crazy city. The trip was a blast, and I hope to go back again soon.