Thursday, December 22, 2011

Postcards from the Journey - Day Ten

We'll call Day Ten the Comedy of Where Ers?

Today we went straight to lunch at Delmonico’s for our second anniversary celeb (can you say “second breakkfast?!”).  Very rich, heavy food, very good.  Apparently, they are the first restaurant to create the Porterhouse, so we split one along with field mushrooms (hongos!) and leeks, and yummy mashed potatoes.  Mike started with a salad with an amazing blue cheese dressing, and I had the lobster appetizer, which was s’posed to be like a shrimp cocktail, but I asked for it heated with drawn butter – YUM-MEE!!! 
 


I’m only TOO glad we’ve been walking so much!  For dessert, we topped it off with a strange but decadent version of Bananas Foster – the usual bananas and brown sugar over both vanilla and chocolate ice cream – but added heath bar, chocolate morsels, cookies, raisins, etc.   Glad Mike blew off his diet and joined me!
   

But then the fun really started … We had a deadline – to get to Brooklyn Tabernacle for their 6:30 pm service.  It didn't help that we got completely lost trying to find where Mike parked the car!  It took us an HOUR to find it.  We were not speaking to one another for awhile as we roamed the streets and asked the locals for help.  We finally stumbled on the parking lot quite by accident. 

@#@#$%^&*&&^%$#$#@!!!!!

We finally made our way to Central Park.  It was a little misty out but really beautiful.  We decided to do the tourist thing and take a buggy ride through the park.  The drivers are all union but most of them looked like they couldn't speak English.  We found a young guy that looked authentic NY, and turned out to be a lot of fun.  He pointed out the high rises surrounding the park that the celebs lived in and gave us a quick history.

The ride is pretty short but it highlights the areas of the park you might want to visit on foot, which is exactly what Mike and I did.  The sun even broke through the clouds for a few minutes.  Then I got lost.

We separated when I wanted to go one way and Mike wanted to go another.  I thought we would meet up a short way further into the park, but that didn't happen.  I didn't know how to get back to the car from where I ended up and I didn’t have my phone! Dumb-de-dum-dumb!

I finally asked a stranger if I could borrow his phone because I was lost.  He let me call Mike, but, of course, Mike didn't know how to give me directions back to the car either.  So, armed with the cross streets the car was on, I made my way back with determination and shear luck.

What else could possibly go wrong?

A ticket.  A lousy parking ticket.  The sign clearly stated the hours parking was allowed - and we were clearly within those hours, but in very small letters it was indicated that those hours only applied to weekends and holidays.  OMG!

And we're late for the prayer service at Brooklyn Tabernacle, and we're mad at each other, and we're mad at the City of New York, and we're mad at GOD, and we're mad at the traffic . . .

And Mike says maybe we should just skip going to Brooklyn Tabernacle.

OH NO - WE'RE GOING TO THE TABERNACLE.


And so we arrived about half way through the service, and it was TOTALLY AWESOME.  With a predominately African American congregation and a Caucasian minister BT is known for it's prayer service.  Even the little bit of the message we heard was great and at the time for prayer, we gathered with those around us and we might as well have been in the throne room of heaven.  We were treated with great kindness by the congregation and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.

We may be LOST at times - and act like children - but focusing on what is true always brings us back to the joy that is within us.

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