Ryan's Commentary on NYC!!

NYC- Candice asked me to do some little write-ups of our experiences on the Big Bad East Coast. I know everyone LOVES a travelogue, so go grab some popcorn, find a place on the couch and ... wait ... hang on a sec, the slide projector's jammed. Gimme a minute.

. Okay. Where to begin, where to begin.

. You may know that we made this trip in the first place because we signed up for some free T-Mobile tickets last Thanksgiving. Getting them to actually GIVE us the tickets is a story for another day (yes, it took almost a year), but after a quick pitstop in Memphis where for the first time in my life, I helped a blind man go to the bathroom, we landed safely at LaGuardia Airport.

. Pop quiz: what's the most important consideration in hotel accommodations for a Nelson? If you said “cost,” give yourself an extra roll of the dice, and move your token down past Park Place, past Broadway, to sunny downtown Queens. To the hotel Howard Johnson on Jamaica Street, to be exact.

. Taking a cab through Queens is kinda like riding a Humvee through Falujah. Jerky lane changes, red light running, horn honking, bumper bumping, driving on the wrong side of the road, car bombs, sniper fire, barbed wire ... and all the time I'm thinking, “How far to the Green Zone?” Daytime travel through Queens is fine, but nighttime can be a little more nerve racking when taking a pretty California girl along. I kept my trigger finger on my pepper spray and wore my BYU hat. No one dares mess with a white boy from Provo.

. Oh boy.

. Anyway, the first stop the next day was NBC Studios (upper right picture) down at Rockefeller Center. They offer tours of some of the sets—no pictures allowed—and we got to see NBC Nightly News, The Late Late Show with Conan O'Brien, and Saturday Night Live. At the end they took us to a fake news studio with a green screen, and asked for two volunteers to do a fake news cast. Of course, Candice made me volunteer, and of course, I screwed it all up. Hey, YOU try to read a teleprompter while pointing at an empty screen behind you.

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I have learned by sad experience that flagrant breaking of the Sabbath leads to bad indigestion, so we did try to maintain some sense of spirituality by paying a visit to the under-renovation Manhattan Temple (pic in upper left), as well the relaxingly serene Central Park (upper middle picture). We also took some time to attend a local sacrament meeting, and wouldn't you know, it was the young single adult ward. I suggested we remove our wedding rings to try to blend in, but Candice wasn't so hot on that idea.

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Now, I'm a law and order kinda guy, right? Honest, upstanding citizen. Pay taxes. Vote. Avoid jury duty. You know. So when we started out Day Two at the United Nations, I though I'd better let security know right up front that we were carrying two little pepper sprays.

. Well, it doesn't take long to realize that at the UN, you're not in America anymore. The first security guard I tried to tell was from Brazil, and spoke about as much English as someone from Brooklyn. She went and grabbed security man #2 who was from Turkey, who asked if I had a permit to carry the spray, and tried to tell me I'd brought an illegal weapon to New York. You know those times when you're trying to get through security, and you're almost there when some idiot holds up the whole line because he accidentally said the word “bomb,” or was wearing steel-toed boots? Yeah, that was us.

. Eventually they found a supervisor who knew enough English to tell them it wasn't any big deal. And then we finally get inside and discover that the tours are all booked up until that afternoon. Oh well. At least we got some nice pictures of the gift shop.

. One of the more somber moments was spent that afternoon, visiting the old World Trade Center site. We watched some of the construction going on in the one-time footprint of the center, and toured through the makeshift memorial nearby where they have a chunk of one of the planes on display. It's a little surreal. A quick swing past Trinity Church (where the National Treasure is buried), Wall Street, and we ended the day at a small Italian restaurant in Little Italy (bottom middle pic). It's gotta be good when the server barely speaks English, right?

. We christened Day Three with obligatory visits to the Statue of Liberty (middle picture) and Ellis Island, and here's my advice to you: buy your tickets ahead of time, online. The pleasure of walking past the people who've been waiting outside the ticket office since 6 AM as they yell at you to get in the back of the line is priceless. “No, YOU get to the back of line!” Just kidding. I was polite, I promise.

. The rest of the day was spent collecting odds-and-ends of New York sites like some kind of weird tourist scavenger hunt. We zipped up north to eat at the Seinfeld restaurant, visited Yankee Stadiums old and new, Times Square for souvenirs (middle left pic), and finally for the big finale: the Majestic Theater for a front row showing of the Phantom of The Opera (bottom left pic). Well, it wasn't really the front row. It was actually the row in front of the very last row. Of the balcony. But it was still fun.The next morning we rented a car, and it was on to DC.