Well, here we are in Yonkers!! Woo Hoo!!! We had a "red eye special" to NY ... but I'm getting ahead of myself:
We finished our time on the west coast with a trip back up the Highway to SFO after enjoying a couple of nights in Monterey. If you're ever in the vicinity - make sure you have a feed at the Monterey Fish House - it is truly magnificent. The venue is not so salubrious, but the food is fresh and absolutely sensational. Although a reservation at home usually means you're seated within ~ 15 minutes, here we waited for over an hour and a half. Thelma gave the very Australian outback whistle to the maître de but I'm not totally convinced everyone in the restaurant appreciated it. LOL! However, we eventually got the service we deserve (!) and were very well looked after by a gorgeous bloke, called Josh - you've gotta love anyone with that name!
Our travels through Cannery Row and Fisherman's Wharf were very 'touristy' and not truly worthy of much of our time, but we ventured slightly south through Pacific Grove and enjoyed lunch at a local restaurant and tried to spy some famous folk ... but only spotted some "maybe" rich folk dolled up to the nines.
We headed north "up the guts" of Highway 101 to SFO and after a couple of dodgy calls from the nagavator, we did manage to return the hire car successfully and in one piece. We arrived at some ungodly hour in the morning, something like 5.30 am (truly, I didn't know there was such a time!) and we had to drag our luggage though subways up hills and down to get to Manhattan Luggage Storage. The woman manning the Luggage Storage was, "not a morning person" as she said. She seemed annoyed to have to deal with us customers being more concerned about feeding the birds. "I look after the birds ... not the people as the birds of this city can't look after themselves!" she declared. I wonder how the boss might feel about that attitude. We weren't impressed.
We headed uptown to Harlem to find the A.Z.E. Church or the other Black American Faith Church (not very PI but sorry!) only to find that being Easter Sunday, and with so many tourists wanting to get inside to hear their wonderful music, they had select seats available for the blow-ins and the majority for their usual congregation. This was fair enough, but unfortunate for us, seeing as we'd come so far and with such little sleep. Although the 'security' bloke tried to move us on ... we stayed and stayed outside on the steps (I pretended to sing along to the words I didn't know), and eventually they let us in, so we filed upstairs to some seats in the bleachers. The music was fabulous, truly black soul music and it stirred up some feelings in me from long ago. The 'warm-up preacher' got the throng moving and grooving with some repetitive yee-haa's, and there were lots of "fire a volley's" (and you non-Salvo's reading this won't understand ... so ask me when I get back!)
The women were dressed to the nines - this photo doesn't really do justice to this woman's outfit - but believe me, she looked magnificent as did all the worshippers (except us!).
We walked and walked and sorted out the subways (sort of), checked in at 3 pm into the loft and got settled, then went out for dinner at a local Italian place for a great feed of calamari and scampi linguini.
We are quite taken with the advertising here - don't worry fella's - we're not taking them up on their offers.
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