Kurt and I have approximately 52 hours to spend in New York city this weekend. Had I known that my boss was GOING ON VACATION, I would have booked an extra day, but there you have it. 52 hours in the Big Apple. What to do??

True to form, I have been researching our area for weeks. And from what I have gleaned from the WWW, it's pretty much awesome. Midtown East...shopping central. Within a 20 minute walking radius we have a 24/7 Apple Store (which we plan to visit in the middle of the night, just because we can and really...who wants to waste time sleeping?), Coach's flagship store, Saks, Tiffany, Henri Bendel, H&M, Borders Books & Music...among many, many others. In geek-fashion (because geeking is necessary when trying to fit the most possible into a short period of time), I have printed a map of the area, marked our hotel, and then mapped out where the stores are that we especially want to visit. We should be at the hotel around noon and have plans to meet for the "FDAW on location" at a local bar around 6, giving us 6 hours to cram in the shopping we'd like to get done so that the rest of the weekend can be spent seeing the sights, eating the eats and drinking the drinks with friends (and friends of friends). On my "must buy" list are jeans, books, an iPod Shuffle for the gym, *possibly* a new purse, and clothes, clothes, clothes. We're pretty much travelling with empty suitcases and will get slammed with duties like nobody's business, but that is just life on this small rock of inflated everything.

I hadn't exactly realized how starved I am for some retail therapy until I unleashed the beast last Friday at the local Nine West and took advantage of a corporate shopping night...to the very great advantage of my closet. As far as shopping goes, the island pretty much sucks. There are a few stores here and there that are semi-OK, but a lot of crap in between and very little selection. What they do have sells out quickly, especially if you happen to be of somewhat average size. Sure, they have that dress you want...but only in a size 0 or a size 14. Awesome! Or not. Books have a huge mark-up on them and normally require a special order (which isn't actually that bad...takes about a week). We have found some deals on items that are inexplicably cheaper here than in Canada, such as running shoes (about $30 less than Canada for all of the main brands i.e. Asics, Mizuno, Brooks, Saucony, etc.), and, to our surprise, maple syrup. Canadian maple syrup, which arrived here on a boat and is put on the shelves for $6.99 for about 500 mL.

I digress.

Obviously with this being my first trip to the city, I'm looking forward to seeing the "big" sites. And the big sights. I can comfortably skip Ground Zero this time around, but the group is thinking about doing one of those hop-on-hop-off bus tour things to get the main attractions at least captured on camera, if not explored a bit. The city is so huge that to try and see it all in 52 hours is actually totally impossible, so we're going to concentrate on our neighborhood this time around and then plan to stay in a different area on each return trip and do the same. For the record, round trip airfare to NYC for Kurt and I from here runs us less than $500 most of the time, for the two of us. This time around it was about $500, but I've seen deals go as low as $150 round-trip per person, so we'll be watching for those too. We bought this trip as a package on Expedia and were thrilled with the deal we got, so...yet another plug for them. I hear their customer service sucks if anything goes wrong, but so far we haven't had to deal with that.

It's going to be a grind to fit it all in, but we're both really looking forward to the whole trip. It may only be 52 hours, but we'll make the most of them.

And with that...I'm off to eat an apple.