And then, I fell asleep on a park bench in Soho.

For our anniversary, Ben and I spent five days in New York City.

It was the first time either of us had been to the Big Apple.

The thing is, for three of those days, Ben was in training from eight to five. Which left me touring the city solo for much of the time.

And it was fabulous.

I wandered through the financial district and snapped pictures of Wall Street and the Stock Exchange. I strolled through Battery Park and had lunch at a cafe at the South Street Seaport. I bought Broadway tickets at a TKTS booth. I took a bus tour of Brooklyn. I visited the New York Police Department Museum and the 9/11 Memorial. I shopped in Little Italy. I stopped at FAO Schwarz and played Heart and Soul on the big piano, just like Tom Hanks. I bought a cheese pretzel from a random street vendor. I watched the Today Show taping from Rockefeller Plaza. I walked through the Upper East Side and toured the Museum of the City of New York. I hailed a cab. I did a lot of people-watching.

Mmmmmm....cheese pretzel.

After my first day of solo-touring, I took a bus down to Soho where Ben's class was, to wait for him to get done with training. I did some shopping there, and then sat at a park bench outside of a small cafe. I got a strawberry-banana smoothie at the cafe, and sat down to do some people watching and wait. Next thing I know, I was totally dozing off.

I woke up thinking, ohmigod I am in downtown New York and I'm totally sleeping on the side of the street and I might as well be a hobo lying on a mattress and thank god I've got a pretty good grip on my bag because I've got three 'I-heart-NY' T-shirts in here for the kids plus an NYPD gift for my father-in-law and also a belt for Ben that I bought at Old Navy because when he got dressed this morning he realized how he'd forgotten to pack his belt and I can't believe I actually stopped in a freaking Old Navy store while I was shopping in New York but what could I do because for pete's sake they had belts on sale for eight dollars.

And then Ben got done with his class, and we hopped back on a tour bus and learned all sorts of random stuff about the city, primarily about how our tour guide's nephew lived on the eighth floor of a really crappy apartment in Greenwich Village.

Don't get me wrong. Ben and I also got to do plenty of cool stuff together.

We watched a real, honest-to-goodness Broadway show (on Broadway!), Jersey Boys, which I totally loved and made me actually like the Four Seasons, about whom I previously had no opinion.

We watched the sunset from the top of the Empire State Building.

We had our anniversary dinner at a totally quaint, awesome, dinky little Italian restaurant in Hell's Kitchen, Mario's Trattoria, which literally had only twelve tables and no tourists, but some of the best Italian food I've ever tasted.

We strolled through Central Park eating hot dogs from a street vendor.

We sat front-and-center in the Ed Sullivan Theatre for the Late Show with David Letterman. We ate Roseanne's nuts.

We rode the Staten Island Ferry, and watched the sun set over the Statue of Liberty. We ate the best dinner of our trip (and possibly our lives) at a nice little Spanish restaurant on Staten Island.

On our last day, we took a ferry to Liberty Island, then spent the rest of the day mastering the subway routes. We rode the subway to Greenwich Village and snapped a picture of the Friends' apartment. We took another train to the Upper West Side and got a picture of the Seinfeld restaurant, and strolled through the campus of Columbia University. We took another subway train to Grand Central Station for the walk back to our hotel, to gather up our luggage and prepare for the trip home.

All in all, I totally loved New York. There's something very comforting about being in a place where anything goes, and people from all walks of life are part of the standard tapestry of the area. I didn't feel any hostility from New Yorkers, and I was totally comfortable wandering the streets from Lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side by myself for three full days.

Some pictures below.