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We're back! The trip was very fun, despite some... adventures. Or near-adventures. Drew will probably write about it in a more entertaining fashion than I can, though.

I will say this- we pilgrammaged to Crumbs, and while they do offer tasty cupcakes, Lyndell's in Somerville (a convenient few blocks from our place!) trumps the fancy NYC cupcakes. I studied this with much science, and empirically found the Crumbs cupcake to be lacking in two key cupcake factors: structural integrity (a must!), and cakey consistency. The frosting was fluffy and creamy, thus gaining a slight advantage over Lyndell's, whose frosting is merely creamy, not fluffy. But the cake portion of the Crumbs cupcake tasted more muffiny than cakey, and crumbled apart too easily. The peanut butter cup cupcake was also a little too densely covered in delicious Reeses morsels, leading to further crumbliness and messiness.

So the verdict was: delicious, but not something for which I wanted to spend $40 for a dozen. After eating the cupcakes we finished our walk from 94th street to 4th street, which had to have been a few miles, thus negating any caloric powers the delicious baked goods may have had.

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So, a little more detail on NYC, though Drew hit the highlights of our many wonders of serendipity.

For lo, the hotel was not where/what I thought it was, but it was super cheap and had comfy beds, and that's all that matters. So on Thursday we arrived in the city, checked in, then headed down to Chelsea to attempt to find the club. It turned out to be in a converted church, which was a great venue to see a show, not such a great venue to try to find, as it was devoid of signage and addressage. And what on earth is up with New York's casual disregard for street numbers making any kind of sense? I don't know how a street ends with number 121 and picks up a block over with number 20 (and this is all West, not going West-to-East or vice-versa, which I could understand). So we found the club, realized that our Must Get To Show panic was for naught, as the ticket time was the door time, and found ourselves some absolutely delicious Mexican food at a little hole in the wall place. Seriously, the best enchiladalas I've ever had. Yum yum. So then the show, Architecture was fantastic, there were lots of high school kids.

Saturday we wandered, ducked into a bookstore to kill time during a torrential downpour, and then met up with our walking tour in the Lower East Side. The tour was entertaining and interesting, and was a good way to see parts of the city we otherwise wouldn't have ventured into. After that we headed on a semi-wild goose chase to find Waikiki Wally's. Got a teensy tiny bit lost and ended up stumbling onto The Library Bar. It turned out to be lucky we did, as we killed time there, figured out that the tiki bar was about a block away, and still managed to show up for tiki time about 15 minutes before the place opened. Go me. But we tikied, we headed back uptown for some comic books, dinner, and beer, and collapsed for sleep and listening to high school kids in the room next door play poker until 6am, at which point they kindly called us (for the 7th time that night) and informed us they were going to McDonald's. We informed them that we weren't their friends.

Sunday involved aforementioned cupcakes, walking from the Upper West Side to the Village, wandering around there exploring and hanging about, then visiting Vol de Nuit. That place was spectacular, and well worth the very weird opening time. What bar opens at 4:00 on a Saurday? Anyway, we then headed back towards our hotel, drank some more, grabbed some pizza, and hotel-ified.

Yesterday morning we walked around for a couple of hours, through the park and through a huge street fair, then drove home through sunny and un-trafficy Connecticut, which was not Teh Suck this time.

Yay!! I *heart* New York.

Off to kung-fu, here's hoping I didn't fall too far out of shape this weekend.