We left for LGA 0600. There were heavy thunderstorms as we were driving to the airport. My girl was going to drop us four (mother in law, my girls aunt, and her daughter) off then go park in economy and take the shuttle. She started texting me a few minutes after I thought she should be parked "I missed the shuttle" and she chased him down through the parking lot. She beat the umbrella on the side of the bus, but he kept driving. She threw in a lot of expletives in her texts and said she was back in the 4Runner waiting for another shuttle to come by. She missed that one, too. Finally, thirty minutes later, my sweet fiance came thru the airport door, drenched and NOT happy. I was worried this might be a pre-cursor for the rest of the trip, but it wasn't...just a hiccup we will laugh about for years to come. The image of her beating on that shuttle bus in the severe thunderstorm still makes me giggle a bit.
We arrived in NYC just before lunch. We took a taxi to our hotel we'd be staying at for our wedding night. We had pre-arranged for them to hold our luggage while we did some touristy things in the city. We took the subway to Battery Park and then ferried over to the statue of Liberty. We spent a couple of hours walking around the museum, pedestal base, and outside around the water. We took the taxi back uptown where we walked to Otto Pizzeria (Mario Batali's restaurant) for our pre-wedding night dinner. The food and wine were great...I had the homemade pasta cheese gnocchi, which to me was the best thing I tried. The others had pizza and my MIL had pasta with spinach and italian sausage. The dessert menu was not appetizing to any of us so we walked around the corner to a Starbucks (I was hoping for a local choclatier but no such luck).
We discussed taking the family to Times Square so we hopped on the subway and headed that way...or so we thought. Turns out we were going Downtown and ended up crossing the river and into Brooklyn. We were just a few stops shy of Coney Island. Oops!! We had a good laugh and got back on the RIGHT subway and walked around Times Square. We sat on the bright red steps. Some kids behind us were smoking pot. Hundreds and hundreds of people were out and about. TLC had a huge screen set up in front of the red steps where they would air the royal wedding Friday morning.
After we walked around TS for a bit we headed to our hotel to pick up our luggage, then on to Grand Central Station. On our way to the hotel we were detained at a roadblock. I saw a news channel van and cameraman with an anchor playing with his ear piece so I asked the cameraman what was going on. He looked at me like I was a dumb girl from Tennessee and said "ummm, the PRESIDENT is in that building" and pointed up to the building we were standing beside. Sheesh...
We took a detour to GCS where we would catch the rail train to the South Norwalk train station. We just missed a train so we would have to wait 45 minutes for the next one. By this time I had blisters from my Sperry's and I was cranky. I sat on the floor in the middle of GCS and people watched. When we got on the train we thought we picked some seats that would remain empty around us. After we took off the next stop we made picked up a couple of drunk folks. Ugh, they sat right in front of us and were OBNOXIOUS the entire ride. Thankfully they got off a couple of stops before us, but it was still a long train ride having to listen to them.
We arrived at the South Norwalk train station and caught a taxi to the hotel. He couldn't shut the trunk because of our luggage so we rode through the town with the trunk lid flopping up and down. We arrived at the hotel shortly before 1 am EST. It took me a long while to go to sleep. I was worried...worried about our wedding day. The forecast was calling for 80% chance of rain at wedding start time. I wasn't sure if what they call thunderstorms were the same kind we have. I also worried that the city wouldn't allow us to stand under their covered area for the ceremony. Our JOP mentioned in an email earlier in the day that he didn't think they would let us. Our photographer also contacted us earlier in the day and asked if we could move our photo shoot time up because she was looking at the forecast and expected rain later in the afternoon, when we were scheduled to have pictures. We agreed to meet at the train station at 1 pm for photos. I think I got a bad piece of meat at Otto and my stomach was not feeling great...this added to my nauseous feelings about the wedding day. Finally, I drifted to sleep, and woke just before the alarm went off.
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