Eat Yourself Silly

New York Day 3:  Before we left on our trip, several friends recommended restaurants that we had to try. We did our best but honestly there weren’t enough meals in three days to hit them all. On Saturday, we decided to ride the subway down to Bleecker Street, one of the oldest streets in New York. It runs though Greenwich Village. Before we left, my friend, Gina, told me about a great subway app. You just put in where you are and where you want to go and bam…you get directions on where the closest subway station is and which train to hop on. This is a marvelous invention. We never got on the wrong train and we rode them all over town. It was nearing lunch time and Nancy’s friend told her about a place called, John’s Pizza of Bleecker Street. We went in and I can’t even describe how wonderful it smelled. I guess it is one of those little places that the locals enjoy. It was established in 1929 and the pizza is baked in coal fired brick ovens. The cozy decor probably hasn't changed much and all the booths had initials and small carvings  by customers past. We sat down and I don’t know what came over us but we all ordered a beer (which is rare for me and I think it was Diane’s first beer she had ever ordered). Then we ordered two pizzas…Nancy and Diane shared a large and I ordered a medium and ate the whole thing except one slice. Now I totally could have eaten that slice but I just couldn’t live with myself knowing I ate an ENTIRE pizza. We polished off two pizzas except for that one slice I didn't have the guts to eat...literally! Our table was right by the open kitchen and we told the surly pizza guru that he made the best pizza we had ever had. He asked us where we were from and Diane told him California...he replied, "Yeah there is no good pizza in California." Compared to what we demolished at lunch, he was right. As I sit on the plane, I really wish we had ordered a pizza to go. 

Waiting for the large pizza to arrive

We spent the rest of the day sightseeing and shopping and by the time we got home, we were tired. It was our last night in New York and we couldn’t just sit in our apartment…where to go to dinner?? My friend Jamie just shared with me a great quote, “If you don’t get out of the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This really pertained to us our last night because we spent a lot of time running around the city but never looked in our own neighborhood. Right next door to our apartment was a restaurant called, Neely’s. I don’t know if you have seen the Neely’s cooking show on the Food Network but they are a cute couple who specialize in comfort food. We made reservations and even after we consumed mass quantities of pizza, we were ready to have us some barbeque. Oh my gosh…we took our already sodium overdosed bodies into that restaurant and ate like it was our last meal on death row. We had these amazing spicy passion fruit drinks that had some kind of jalapeno and passion fruit juice. It had a hot little kick when it hit your throat. We then ordered hushpuppies and deep fried pickles but we didn’t stop there. I had delicious baby back ribs with a side of mac and cheese and Diane and Nancy ordered beer can chicken with some mac on the side. What started out as a fine meal ended up as, “What were we thinking???” Our appendages are still swollen from all the bad eats but we promise to be good starting tomorrow!

Nancy and Diane with Lady Liberty...she looks bigger on TV!

Saturday was a great day, with great memories. I wish laughing burned all the calories we took in that day….we’d be skinny by now.