Gratitude for Four Wonderful Days in NYC

I arrived home late last night from New York City (NYC). I managed to take 700 photos and I created twelve pages of sketches in my art journal in four short days (September 24-28, 2015).

It will take me a couple of days to sort through them all and organize them into blog posts but in the mean time, I want to express my most sincere gratitude to the following folks:

Firstly, I am thankful for my life partner Don (who never takes vacations) for giving my daughter and me this gift of a vacation trip to NYC. He set aside the money for us to do this trip back in June 2015 so that it would not be a question of "IF" we would be visiting NYCin 2015, but rather a question of "WHEN" we would vacation in NYC.

I am also extremely thankful for Elisabeth (and her sister Jenn) for accommodating my daughter and me in a most beautiful Morningside Heights airbnb apartment. I am also thankful for all of their wonderful restaurant/coffee shop/bagel shop suggestions and their kind accommodations to our special needs around arrival and departure times. Apartment 2B was a safe, beautiful and magical place to stay and for that I am sincerely grateful.

Grateful for Apt. 2B 

I am thankful for Mark Leibowitz and the NYC urban sketching group for their wonderful, warm welcome and the great time I had joining them (ever so briefly) at their Brooklyn Heights sketching outing on Sunday September 27, 2015.

And who knew, as a bonus, that I would be witness to President Obama arriving in NYC on the Marine One helicopter while sketching as well!?

Grateful for Mark Leibowitz and the NYC Urban Sketching group for the warm welcome.

And last, but in no ways least, I am grateful for my daughter Meagan who is the most amazing travel partner and who loves New York City as much as I do..... if not more (but she is much better at directions and knows all the best places to go).

I am grateful for Meagan's gifts of tickets to the ballet Swan Lake at Lincoln Center and a visit to the Top of the Rock on our last night to catch the sun setting over Manhattan.

And I am so happy for Meagan that we sat beside her ballet idol Misty Copeland at Ladurée SOHO on our last day in NYC!

Grateful for my daughter Meagan

I am so lucky and so blessed.

French proverb: " Gratitude is the memory of the heart"

Grateful for the beautiful sunset on our last night in NYC