NYC Nights Out

Last week I tagged along with Kevin on his business trip to NYC. The highlight of our week was all the date nights we were able to have together! All of our date nights included some sort of activity and yummy food.

We arrived in NYC on Monday evening and headed straight to our hotel in Chelsea to check in... and then we walked over to Madison Square Park for dinner at the Shake Shack.

Definitely our sort of place- delicious fries, shakes, burgers (or grilled cheese sandwiches for me)... and great ambiance. It was chilly outside, but the views of the Empire State Building all lit up, the Met Life Tower, and the Flatiron building all around us were beautiful. People watching was also a lot of fun. The manpris were definitely my favorite.

From Madison Square Park we walked to a nearby movie theater to catch the late showing of The Social Network. I loved it... and I stayed awake... and the seats were super comfortable (I stretched my legs out across 3 of them). Totally worth the $12 ticket price.

Tuesday night we headed uptown to the Manhattan Temple for an evening session. I was a little embarrassed because I forgot to bring a skirt on the trip... so I had to walk into the temple in jeans. Fortunately we were greeted at the door by my high school seminary teacher of four years, Br. (now Elder) Clark, who is serving a mission at the temple. He was so excited to see us and all the other temple workers made us feel so welcomed (despite my jeans :)).

We haven't been back to the Manhattan Temple in four years. The trip brought back a lot of memories of our wedding day (almost 5 years ago) and many other special times our family has shared in that temple together.

After the temple we went to Mariella's for their amazing pizza. Apparently Oprah and Gayle deemed it the Best NYC Pizza... why knew? It was gooey, greasy, thin crust pizza and it was delicious! We were definitely happy we stumbled upon it close to Central Park.

Our final date night of the week included some shopping around Union Square Park and a trip to Max Brenner for dinner and dessert. "Wow, look at that!" was a common statement as we watched other people get their food. The best way to go about eating there is to share something for dinner so that you can go all out for dessert.

Kev LOVED the hot chocolate- says it is among the best he's ever had

We shared this pasta for dinner. Spinach, ricotta cheese, tomato-pesto... mmm! It was gone quickly and I was worried we wouldn't have room for the chocolatey stuff... but we managed. :)

I had the Spectacular Melting Chocolate S'mores Sundae. It was huge. I maybe ate 1/3 of it...but the chocolate gelato and milk chocolate fondue inside was insanely good, as was everything else they threw in there.

Kevin had the Melting Chocolate Truffle Heart cake and shake.

The menus were enormous and had too many really good options. The waitress had to come back 3-4 times before we had finally decided on what we wanted.

We walked off our meal by shopping for awhile and then trekking back to the hotel on foot instead of hopping on the subway. Good thing I ran every day that we were on our trip or I would not have fit into a seat on the airplane.

I have a feeling that when we become a family of four soon and get out less just the two of us, we'll really look back fondly on all the fun times we had in NYC together.

Stay tuned for more of my fun NYC adventures when I get a sec to blog some more.