Girls' Weekend in NYC

What am I doing in New York on a weekend in November?  Because I couldn't be here on a weekend in August.  Every year my sis and I take a trip together.  We have prowled eastern Pennsylvania in search of gardens; we have been to the beach; we have mucked about in Kentucky horse country and spent a long weekend in a Shaker village. 

What we've never done is New York City, a place Kathy visits routinely for her job, but where I had never been.  What an obvious choice.  Then we decided this would be a fun thing to do with my daughters, and so the plan required really cheap plane tickets, thus, November.

And here we are, although perhaps Sarah wishes she wasn't, insofar as she took one look at the plane and would have backed out on the spot if she could have.  New York, home of more people than the entire state of Virginia, is also home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the big carrot with which we got Sarah up the steps and onto the plane.  (Our pictures will follow just as soon as we get home and have a cable to upload them.)  If there's one thing we all love, it's an art museum, and New York is full of them.

The Met is particularly lovable, because it contains millions of objects, carefully curated, and it's the best bargain in New York, otherwise known as home of the $3 Coke.  Our favorites:  Sarah -- Asian art; Suzanne -- Japanese armor; Kathy -- decorative arts period rooms; Janet -- Impressionists.  But of course, we perhaps, in our six hours there, made it through a third of the collections.  A lifetime might not be enough to sit in front of Renoir's sunflowers, or watch children react to the temple of Dendur, which has it's own plaza and atrium.  We sat there, in the afternoon sunlight, looking at the colorful trees in Central Park, and thinking peaceful thoughts, while a class of what looked like eight-year-olds lined up in front of the huge statues for a group shot.  One of them had his name tag on his forehead.

After we'd museumed as much as we could stand, we grabbed a taxi back to our hotel, and the girls napped like they were eight years old themselves.  At the recommendation of our concierge, we walked to a local restaurant, Luna Piena, for fabulous Italian food, including a fig and prosciutto appetizer that was out of this world.  The blood orange sorbet was fine, too, and so we strolled back through the early evening, tired but content.  A dose of urban life once in a while isn't a bad thing.