Since I was a little kid, I really wanted to see games at Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. Not quite as high on the list, but important nonetheless, was Yankee Stadium.

I dragged my wife to see games at Wrigley and Fenway a few years back, and on Saturday, I finally completed the trifecta by seeing one at Yankee Stadium. The timing was good, as they are permanently closing Yankee Stadium at the end of this season (there are only a few homestands left). Yankee Stadium holds a special place in my heart--it's where Lou Gehrig gave his his "Luckiest Man" speech on July 4, 1939...a speech that I grew up thinking about...and was the theme of the speech I gave at my wedding.

Several weeks ago, I emailed an old friend who works for YES, the Yankees cable channel, to ask if he wanted to go to the game with me on August 16. He said he was going to be out of town, but he would send me a couple of tix. Holy cow, what tix these turned out to be. It was the YES suite...great views, full catering, and a private restroom. Perhaps the best part was that I was right behind a kid in the suite who caught a foul ball...his excitement was infectious.

I try to not be the jaded corporate type who sits in a luxury box and shrugs it off nonchalantly, but I also managed to avoid yelling YAHOO! at the top of my lungs when I saw how good the seats were.

***

Before the trip, I had asked my friend who works for Fairmont Hotels if she could hook me up with a discounted rate at the Fairmont (Plaza) in NYC...it is the classic hotel at 59th and 5th, the "Eloise" hotel at the SE corner of Central Park, with a massive renovation recently completed. The lowest rate on the Fairmont website was $775 per night, but my friend told me she could hook me up for a mere $400 per night. A great discount of course, very generous of her...but $400 per night plus taxes and such would have put me all-in around $1K for the two nights. So I passed. While I have come a long way from the days when I spent the night with my friend Steve in Penn Station in NYC to save money in 1990, I haven't come far enough to spend $1K for two nights in a hotel, especially without even having my wife along.

I did check out the Plaza though. It was stunning. They had a display board with a blown-up copy of their original rates from when they opened (1907 maybe). The lowest priced room was $2.50. (For a night, not for an hour!)

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, after I passed on the Plaza deal, I kicked my mooching skills into high gear, and I asked a friend who runs a hedge fund if I could stay in his apartment in NYC for two nights. He has places in San Paulo, San Francisco, and New York, plus a maybe one or two more that I forgot. He was going to be out of town, but FedEx'd an extra set of keys to me and told me to enjoy.

It was a place with soul, a nice spacious loft in a converted industrial building in NOLITA (NOrth of LIttle ITAly), next to SOHO and SE of Greenwich Village. So, I got to explore neighborhoods I had never seen before...fascinating places, but this entry is long in the tooth and about to get longer, so I will spare you my big pretentious thoughts on NYC's portmanteau neighborhoods like Soho, Nolita, and Tribeca.

***

On Friday night, I was on my flight to JFK from LAX and somewhere over Kansas, the pilot said, "we're going to be about 40 minutes early to JFK, we have a nice tailwind." Us jaded travelers just rolled our eyes...we know to believe it when we see it. Later, we were halfway through our descent to JFK and natch, the pilot says, "We have weather problems at JFK, we are going to hold." Then, maybe 30 minutes later, he says, "There is a full ground stop at JFK. We are running out of fuel! We are going to divert to Washington DC."

Just kidding, he did not say, "We are running out of fuel!" But he did say that we needed to land very soon to take on fuel, which made some people around me look at each other nervously.

I am certain that regulations prevent pilots from circling until they get dangerously low on fuel, and I wasn't worried. We landed at Dulles, and after maybe an hour and a half, the pilots starting receiving requests from passengers who wanted to call it a night and stay in DC (we never came to a gate, just sat on tarmac). The pilot said "NFW!" (very nicely, of course) and "You need to stay on the f***ing plane!" (Also very nicely, of course). And, finally, we arrived at JFK 4+ hours late.

I had plans to meet someone for dinner, which I thought he would want to cancel due to my flight delay. But he waited for me and we ended up getting to an Italian restaurant in Nolita at 1:30 am. There was a line for tables. In the US, I think NYC is perhaps the only place where no one bats eye about starting dinner in a restaurant (that is not a Denny’s or similar all-night diner) at 1:30 am.

***

On Saturday, after the Yanks game, with an old friend from high school, I did a 35-minute swing through of MOMA (nice but not my cup of tea...I don't understand most of the "art") and then saw a play, way off Broadway, "Around the World in 80 Days." It was at the Irish Rep, a very, very small but classy theater, with good actors.

***

I went running Sunday morning...across the Brooklyn Bridge, something I have wanted to do for a long time. A true engineering marvel when completed in 1869, now a work of art and a historic structure that is highly functional. On the same run, I went down to Wall Street, and then the WTC site. Ground zero still hits me hard, perhaps because I have only seen it live three times. Hallowed ground.

As an example of people can do when government gets out of the way, the fellow (Larry Silverstein) who essentially controls the lease of the WTC site, already designed and built a brand new office tower on a site adjacent to ground zero. It is a nice building, but it's not iconic (nor, I think, was it designed to be).

Finally, I went to the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday morning. You know how some things that seemed big when you were a kid seem small now? Not true with AMNH. Seemed like an enormous building when I first went in it three decades ago; and sho nuff, it is still an enormous building. On Sunday, I saw a special exhibit on the history of horses. AMNH did a great job with the horse exhibit; the point was to show how we changed horses, but also how horses changed us. Fascinating stuff. Plus I saw several of the old standbys.

Then, Sunday afternoon, I went back to the NOLITA loft, and took the 6 Train (Subway) to the E Train through Queens back to JFK. Then, a non-eventful flight home, and my lovely wife picked me up at the airport...and here I am back at work on Monday.

What's that you say? You were looking for a point to this entry?! Hah, you just got a travelogue instead.