Our New York City Trip!

Robert and I got to go to New York for the week. I have always wanted to go there ever since I was little, so I was really excited! A black town car was waiting for us at the airport, so right away I felt fancy!
After a quick deli dinner, we headed to Times Square!
Around midnight we wandered into "Ripley's Believe It or Not" Museum. (That place gave me the heeby-jeebys! There were a lot of shrunken heads.)
First, we were greeted by a replicaa of the world's tallest man. And look, I'm finally almost 5'3"!
Then we saw the two headed cow, which inspired me to make up a joke...
Q: What kind of dress does a two headed cow wear?
A: A Moo-Moo.There was also an exhibit of strange tongue tricks. I displayed my own tongue trick in the two way mirror.
I even contacted the manager after reading a sign that said to share any strange tricks of your own. He gasped loudly when he saw my trick, but apparently it was not impressive enough to put on display.
We took a picture of the real Bumblebee robot from Transformers to show to Stanton.
Then I posed for a quick picture with a wax statue of my relative, "The Rock."
He is my step-brother's wife's cousin's wife's sister's son. I'm not even joking!
The next morning we went on the Harbor Cruise around New York and saw all of the sights, including The Statue of Liberty.
Afterwards, I joined a group of Chinese protesters, rallying for democracy in China! I mean, really, who doesn't want Chinese freedom!
Then we went on a tour of the New York Public Library. It's the oldest, largest and probably most beautiful public library in the U.S. The entire thing is made of marble. There are no steel beams whatsoever. There are also 205 miles of shelving for books! (I'm sure Robert has probably read close to 100 miles of those books.)
After the library, we went on a tour of the U.N. It was so, so, so cool! We got to go in the rooms where they hold the General Assembly and the Security Council. We learned all about what goes on! It was so neat to be in a room where so many countries and so many languages are represented.
On the way back to our hotel, Robert stopped and got me flowers from a flower stand, just like I've always wanted!
Then we had a delicious dinner with his Dad (who was there on business)at Carmine's, a really fun Italian restaurant.
The next day was our museum day, so I wore my fanciest headband (which I made!) We had planned on going to four museums, but the Museum of Natural History was just too fantastic to leave. We saw a planetarium show, a bunch of awesome, huge dead animals, displays from cultures around the world and tons of other stuff. We stayed there for hours.
After that we walked and walked around Central Park, and I was starting to get really whiney.
The day before we had walked close to ten miles, and I had tons of blisters because I didn't bring tennis shoes because they don't look nice with dresses.. And then I tripped and my ankle hurt really bad, so I got a little grumpy and shed some whiney tears, so...
when we got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert surprised me with a wheelchair. He pushed me all over the museum, and everytime I would get out of my wheelchair to take a picture next to one of the paintings, I think people thought it must have been a miracle cause everyone kept starring at me.
Or maybe they figured out that I was just a whiney, lazy girl hogging the wheel chair. (To my credit though, my ankle really hurt. I thought I sprained i, but I didn't.)
The Met was really great! There was an exhibit all about knights and swords and also so many famous paintings! It was fun to see real Picasso, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Dali, and Jackson Pollack paintings all up close!
That night we went to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway! It was phenomenal! I love, love, loved it, especially because all growing up, I used to really, really want to be in a Broadway play, until I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, then a figure skater, then a CIA agent, then a translator, then a screenwriter, etc, etc. Anyways, it was a definite highlight!
The day after that we went to Ellis Island. It was really fun, although I think I hyped it up in my mind.
I thought there would be this big, giant book of immigrant's names, and I pictured myself running my finger down the alphabetized list, until I got to "Guimont" and found Louis and Oscar and Emiline and all of my other French ancestors who came to America through Ellis Island. Then I thought I would get to see their passport picture and read all about them.
There was no such book there. Robert said I was thinking of Santa's book at the North Pole.
I did get to walk down the same stair case my ancestors came down after they were welcomed into the United States though, so that was fun!
Next we walked down Wall Street, and Robert and I got our picture next to the famous bull.
Just kidding, that's not me!
Before every trip Robert puts in hours and hours of planning and research and maps out every detail and makes reservations for every tour and finds every restaurant, which I really appreciate because we get to do so much more fun stuff that way. In the process of his planning, he always asks me to find somewhere I would like to go that he did not think of.
So this time I picked a pickle factory, and we went! They pickle everything there! We even tried pickled pineapple! It was really good. It had cloves in it.
Then we stopped by a little doughnut shop Robert had seen on Food Network. It was the best donut of my life, and might also even take the gold in the best dessert of my life category! We tried a creme brulee doughnut and a white peach doughnut and a tres leches doughnut, indescribable!
That evening we saw the September 11th Memorial, which was really beautiful, and then we had dinner at Centrica, Aaron Sanchez's restaurant. The Aaron Sanchez from The Food Network show "Chopped,"which happens to be my favorite show ever!
We planned to go there for lunch, so we stopped in, but they were closed. Not even expecting him to be there (because we went to Bobby Flay's restaurant in Vegas , and they said he rarely comes in,) I opened the door, and peeked my head in to see what time they opened for dinner, and I see none other than, Aaron himself!
I screamed so loud, right in his face! Robert rushed in behind me because he said he thought I saw a dead body, but I didn't.
Then I started talking really fast and saying dumb stuff. He was so nice though! He took a picture with me, and told us to come back that night, no reservations needed. (It was like we were life long amigos!) So we went back that night for dinner with Robert's Dad, and Aaron came to our table and talked to us and took more pictures and signed a menu for my sister-in-law. See what I mean, life long amigos!
P.s. The food was so excellent! We even ordered the chocolate lava cake with sweet corn ice cream that fell on the final episode of "Chopped Champions" and cost him the victory! As soon as I tasted it, I knew that had it risen properly, he would have won!
After dinner Robert and I went to the top of the Empire State Building. We took the audio tour, and then we danced a little bit to the saxaphone music, played by our new friend Wil Greenstreet. He's from Scotland and Australia, and he doesn't know any Elton John or Neil Diamond songs (much to my dismay) but he did play a nice Nat King Cole song, at Robert's request, for us to dance to.
After that we ate a Fifth Avenue Bar on 5th Ave. It was very melted because we bought it our first night and carried it all around for days until we finally went to 5th Ave, but it was still sort of edible.
We didn't get a chance to eat Subway on the subway like we wanted because the subway broke down the one time we rode it, and we have yet to eat a Blizzard in a blizzard, but we're getting there.
On the morning of our last day Robert had arranged a tour of The Early Show, CBS's national morning show that comes on right after Robert's newscast. He also arranged a live shot for Paul, Channel 5 morning show's extremely fun host, who happened to be in New York with his cute wife, Jennifer at the same time as us. It was so much fun! We sat ten feet away from them during the entire taping of the show! Then we got to sit at the desk with them. Their last segment was about Octoberfest. No Octoberfest for Robert and Kimmie though! I told them just agua for us Mormons (:
As soon as we were done with the tour, we hurried over to the Today Show! Paul had a friend there filling in for weather, and she gave us a tour of the set, and we even got to see Al Roker's dressing room and Matt Lauer's office! It felt like we were cheating on the Early Show, but that's okay because it was SO awesome!!!!
There we are Paul, Jennifer, Robert and I, just hanging out, sitting right where Matt Lauer and Anne Curry sit, looking out the huge window at Rockafeller Center!
Before we headed to the airport, we stopped at F.A.O. Schwartz to pick up a present for the kids, and there was no way we could pass up an opportunity to dance on the huge piano from the movie "Big!"
Robert's had such fancy footwork on that piano, he could've been an extra for Tom Hanks in the movie!
It was such a perfectly fantastic trip!
I have so many fun memories of us meeting all sorts of interesting people from the coolest countries, with the coolest accents and of making friends with one cab driver from Bangledesh who sounded like the really nice alien from "Galaxy Quest" and another friendly cab driver from Pakistan asking us if we were Jewish, and then ending up having a very nice conversation with him about Mormons and Muslims, and memories of eating Brazilian food and Thai food in the tiniest restaurants and trying out yummy pizza places and gross hot dog stands, and of us feeling so guilty for not having any cash to tip the bell hop, that we both couldn't sleep so we got dressed sometime after midnight and walked to CVS to get cashback for him, of us making fancy hot chocolate every single night and every single morning in our hotel, walking through Chinatown, haggling with purse vendors on the side of the street and of many failed attempts on my part to hail a taxi cab, with Robert standing there cracking up laughing at me, while I waived my arms frantically in the rain, in the middle of the street yelling "Hiring more taxi drivers would create more jobs! There I just fixed the economy!"
I could go on and on! It was five days of non-stop fun! Robert is the most exciting person to travel with! I'm so blessed to be able to go to such an amazing place with such an amazing husband!