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New York, New York

It's official: Dan and I, at some point within the next year, will be moving to the New York City area. Yes, I know that technically we're moving to New Jersey, but there's just not a lot of glamor in saying "Hey! We're moving to New Jersey!" So we're going to polish things up a bit and focus on the nearby distraction. Besides, we'll be closer to NYC than we currently are to San Francisco, and that's a perfectly acceptable reference. So here's our initial preview trip provided to us by Roche. They treated us very well and gave us no reason not to want to move. Other than the fact it was 32 degrees F (0 degrees C) and snowing.

December 5-7, 2008
Total Miles: lots
Mountain View, CA to New York, NY
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The trip started Thursday night with a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Newark, NJ. I slept miserably and wasn't happy to be awake for the landing. But a limo driver met us at baggage claim and drove us to the hotel. At this point Dan changed clothes, got into another car and headed for the Roche campus in Nutley, about 13 miles away. I went up to the room to get a nap. I promply overslept and missed the "family bus" to Nutley and had to hire my own driver to get there. See? I need my motorcycle around if I'm going to get anywhere on time. I missed lunch, but spent the rest of the day with the group in a fancy tour bus, being driven around the suggested towns near to Nutley. It was a relaxing afternoon but I was ready for another nap when we got back to the room. Instead, Dan napped and I watched bad hotel TV. Then there was a fancy dinner in the hotel, complete with a chocolate fountain. Can you guess where I spent a good deal of my evening?
A nicely-appointed room at the Hyatt
Lots of room to spread out our stuff
A view from our room (if you craned your neck a bit)
The view at night

Saturday was the unofficial house-hunting day. While we weren't there to buy a house, we did have a realtor assigned to us (Jordon, a very nice guy) to drive us around all day. He had sent us listings a couple of weeks prior and we went through them, trimming out the ugly, distant and expensive; giving him a cherry-picked list of what we might like. We quickly discounted a couple of towns because they were too far from Nutley, or didn't have a nice downtown area nearby. We finally settled on the towns of Verona and Montlclair, with Montclair in the lead.

We went into a few houses, again to give our realtor a good idea of what we like so that in the future, when we come back to buy, he'll have a good idea of what to show us. We also took some time to have lunch in Montclair itself. Jordon knew of a "great little Cuban place" and he was right. The food and atmosphere were both fantastic! We were right in "downtown Montclair" and got a good idea of the hustle and bustle of the place. I could be happy living in a such a diverse location. Then Jordon showed us what would be our favorite house of the day and it was conveniently located just a few (long) blocks from Main St. Finally the day was done; Jordon dropped us off to enjoy a quite evening walking around the vaguely interesting area around the hotel, looking for dinner (which we found, btw - a lovely Irish restaurant with excellent food)
This view is from the top floor of our building
For my mom...
Hoboken. Who knew?
Exit for Nutley
Cuban Pete's in Montclair
Heading "back" to Cuban Pete's

Below are some radom pictures, captioned for your pleasure...
Downtown Montclair
Culture in Montclair!!!
A house for sale...
...but it wasn't to our tastes
A very nice house for sale
Inside the house
The front room(s)
An awesome stove in the kitchen
Sunday! Ok, not so much text here. Sunday was our free day. Our driver wasn't due at the hotel until 4pm to take us back to the airport, so we had all day to play. We took a train into the city and then walked around for hours. I estimate that we covered about five miles, and I was only too happy to take a subway back to the train station to get back to the hotel.
Heading down to the train
Can you spot Dan?
He's so subtle in the big city
The World Trade Center site
What the plans include
A monument to the Irish Famine
Reconstructed walls
Ok, so I have no idea what this was about, but I thought it looked cool.
Our hotel across the Hudson River
Courthouse
Dan, hiding in plain sight
An Asian district
Leave it and it will leave you...
Clever marketing
Italian district!
I'm sure that it has a name and a reason, but I didn't look it up
The Empire State Building
Nice walk-ups
Tree houses in the park
Dog park
New York - you can find anything here
Old advertisements
Crowd control
Central Park
Radio City Music Hall
Rockefeller Center
Times Square
Overload!!!
And the ads just keep getting bigger

Obviously we saw quite a bit, but we know that we had barely scraped the surface of what the city has to offer. The crowds were a bit more than I enjoy, but not unbearable. The train and subway were easy to navigate (once you find the subway entrance, that is!). Our flight home wasn't bad, once we got in the air. We had a 30 minute delay getting onto the plane, another 30 minute delay while they tried to fuel the plane (the eventually succeeded) and then an hour delay as we sat on the runway waiting for our turn to take off. The wind was extremely strong (pilots were reporting "10 degrees, give or take", an indication of how much the plane shifted as they came in) and it was a slow process. We eventually got to our apartment at 1am. That made for a long weekend that I couldn't very well talk about at work the next day, seeing as they don't know that Dan's being relocated just yet.

I think that we'll be very happy there. We both enjoy the seasons, we'll make new friends, we'll get to know the city and we'll have the opportunity to ride north through the Canadian provinces, as well as the northeastern States. It should be an exciting time!