wicked weekend in shiny things

SO. Weekend before last I got to go to New York with my cousins. Some long-time Open Diary readers will remember Cousin E, who used to write over there. Cousin E is three years older than I am, and has two sisters, one who is pretty much exactly my age (four months older) and one who is 2 1/2 years younger- my brother's age. They used to spend summers with our grandfather and our aunt, who lived one house down from my family. That meant we had a whole lot of quality time together, and we are still close. Cousins E, J and MJ are the nearest things to sisters that I have.

Cousins E, J and MJ had an aunt on their dad's side who passed away a year and a half ago. Aunt Mildred was their dad's only sibling (their mom and my dad were brother and sister so Mildred wasn't technically related to me) and she was SO the Cool Aunt when we were kids. Mildred never married and lived by herself and always sent them great presents. Like the massive Swiss Army knife she sent to Cousin J when Cousin J joined the Peace Corps way back in the late-80s.

Mildred was living in an assisted living apartment in Delaware when she died, near Cousin MJ and Cousin J. She had a lot of stuff. She especially had a lot of jewelry. Some of it junk, some of it good quality. The cousins kept some and gave some away and sold some on eBay. And ended up making a whole lot of money selling what they sold on eBay. They decided to use it for a fun weekend away. And they invited me along. (We'd been trying to do a "girl's trip" for, literally, years. Like, six at least.)

I flew to Baltimore, got collected at the airport by Cousin E, then we drove on to Delaware. Met J and MJ at MJ's house, and drove on from there to NY. Not that long a drive-- I think two hours from MJ's house, which kind of surprised me. As did MJ's total nonchalance re: driving into New York. She drove and J navigated via Google Maps and a tablet.... which unfortunately froze solid just past the Holland Tunnel at an extremely confusing junction. If I'd been driving, mass panic would have ensued, but MJ was calm and unfazed and J's phone rescued us. Although it had problems with exact locations too. STILL, we made it, nobody panicked, and we found the hotel and got checked in.

New York in the distance was very exciting!! Bad picture and all!! I hadn't been to New York in... 30 years, probably. Since I was married to First Husband and we lived in DC and his sister got married in NY. That was... 1985-ish. So, yeah. Thirty years. I find that quite scary.

MJ being very calm in the Holland Tunnel.

We stayed at the Flat Iron Hotel in Manhattan, which was very nice. Lots of character, really cool rooms. Fourth floor, a corner room, views!

I stole this one from Cousin E-- it's better than any of my pictures of our room and also has the added bonus of me putting on makeup in front of the mirror and holding the curtain open with my feet in order to get more light. MJ is drying her hair in a normal fashion without using her feet.

Another view:

The hallways were fun too:

And check out the two-story fishtank in the lobby: ![

Well, in typical fashion, this has taken me so long that I'm tired of it and will continue later. I don't know why I've got such wildly varying sizes of pictures-- I took the last two from my FB account because I didn't want to dig through Flickr, and although they are the same size on FB, one is huge and one is normal here. Maybe I better stick to Flickr from now on- I do at least know how to select the sizes there.