"These lights will make you feel brand new"

You know the phrase, "The honeymoon is over"? Like after a married couple's first big fight or argument and someone says, "I guess the honeymoon is over," as if things will never be the same ever again because the fight has shattered the untarnished winning streak of the marriage, like a wildcard grounder that ends a pitcher's 9^th-inning no-hitter. Well, for Sara and I, the honeymoon is over. But not for that reason. I mean literally, the honeymoon is over. It's over. Finished. Complete. Done. Period.

This, of course, is sad for us because we were looking forward to our honeymoon, and now that it's over I guess the year-long wedding phase of our lives has come to an official end. I proposed March 4, 2011, and now we're home from our honeymoon by the end of February 2012. And in between was wedding planning, Ohio engagement party, wedding, reception and so much more.

There was also a rather nasty illness, which is why we had to postpone — and then postpone again — our honeymoon. If you recall we were supposed to go to Denver in October, and then somewhere else in November, and we could have gone to California in December. These were all bumped or canceled because Sara was sick with a mystery illness we still to this day don't know too much about. There is one thing we do know: Sara is much, much better. (She's so healthy that my original sentence, the one that follows this one, doesn't work anymore because she's that much better. Here is the sentence: "If she's not 100 percent healthy then it's something like 98.7 percent, something so close to fully recuperated that most people would just round it up to 100 and call it day.")

Knowing all this now about some of our medical drama, maybe you can appreciate how excited we were for our New York City honeymoon that we took last month. We were beyond excited: Sara was feeling good, we both were craving some New York food, we needed to get away from work and clear our heads, and we just really wanted to spend some quality time together away from Arizona.

Now picture us: excited couple, half-packed bags, maps gathered, money transferred, tickets printed, email checked … email, oh crap! (It was actually more like "oh shit!" and then other worse words after that.) The late-morning/early-afternoon of our flight, Sara checked her email and discovered that we had missed our plane. We thought we were booked for the red-eye flight to New York City on Wednesday night. We had written it down wrong in Sara's calendar; we were actually scheduled to fly out on the red-eye on Tuesday night. This rather massive error was discovered by Sara roughly 12 hours after our missed flight.

So there we are at work frantically calling JetBlue in my office as tears start to well up in both our eyes as an unsettling thought — no honeymoon for us — starts to grow in our stomachs. All I can really remember from that moment was silently fuming at my desk as I held the phone to my ear. At one point I looked down at my hand and my knuckles were white because I was holding the phone so tight. I was mostly mad at myself, that I would be so dumb to not check our itinerary, especially after JetBlue was considerate enough to email it to me seconds after we booked our trip two weeks prior.

Well to make a long story less long, JetBlue ended up coming through for us. We had to pay $200 to rebook our outgoing flight, but we were able to take the next available flight, which was 3 hours later, which meant I had to race through my photo assignments and Sara had to churn out a fairly long story in about an hour. We also had to get home and finish packing, and then get to the airport. It was frantic and chaotic but we made it, with special thanks to Jonathan for taking a long lunch break to drive us to the airport. By the time we were walking around in Manhattan's Upper East Side 7 hours later, Sara and I both turned to each other and were pretty much in awe that we made it.

After we arrived, we waltzed right through JFK's Terminal 5, which we had missed so much since our All-You-Can Jet times from September 2010. We jumped on the AirTrain and then connected to the E Train that runs through Queens and then into Manhattan and eventually all the way down to the World Trade Center site. At Lexington and 53^rd Street we transferred to the 6 Train, the only subway that runs up Manhattan's east side. We pretty much used the E and 6 trains the entire time, and I didn't get us lost once. (There were lots of moments where I was sure I did get us lost but after referring to our "obviously-I'm-a-tourist" map I learned we were always on course.)

We were staying at my friend Jennifer's apartment. She's lived in NYC for years and she let us stay in her studio apartment — Paul Rudd would call it a "microloft" — while she was in Phoenix visiting her family. After settling in and unpacking some of our things Sara and I ventured out and found a little Greek diner where Sara had a salad and apple pie, and I had pancakes — what a combo, huh?! It was pretty uneventful except we noticed that there were a lot of people out late walking their dogs, and only about half of them picked up the poop, the other half just walked away. This one poor woman was walking her dog and he decided to stop right in front of the restaurant's window to take care of his business.

The next day we hit the street full force starting at 89^th Street and heading west into Central Park. Along the way we stopped at Glaser's Bakery and had some breakfast and then got back out on the street to take in the sites. The weather was wonderful as we walked through Central Park, eventually detouring around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then back into the park again. At one point I even took my jacket off, though that was the only time that would happen. The park is very different when the trees are all bare, but it still looked amazing. We walked through a group of rambunctious Navy students who were climbing all over the Alice in the Wonderland statue, and then we stopped and watched a puppeteer perform a children's show with Humpty Dumpty and a balancing egg. Right before Humpty moved the egg from his hand to his foot, a huge gust of wind blew through the park sending sticks, leaves and dirt everywhere. We were picking bits of the park out of our hair, eyes and skin the rest of the day, but the wind felt great. (Us Arizonans really miss the seasons.)

From there we wandered past the Apple store, the Plaza Hotel, and some other notable sites on the edge of the park. Then we went to the Roosevelt Island Tramway that runs next to the Queensboro Bridge. We packed in that little cable car with like 25 other people and then it went high up over the East River parallel to the bridge and then down again onto Roosevelt Island. There's nothing really to see there, so we decided to get back on the tram and come right back. The view was spectacular. You can see the tram quite clearly if you watch the first Spider-Man movie. It was on the tram that Sara noticed something special about New York's diversity: half the people on the tram spoke something other than English. 

After the tram we walked over to Columbus Circle and then down Broadway to the new Steak'n'Shake next to the Letterman studio. Ever since Ohio I was craving me some Steak'n'Shake. We noticed something strange when we were there: all the workers who were taking orders or greeting guests were very attractive tall black women. They looked like models, all of them. We took our lunch down into Time Square, where we dodged the guys who heckle tourists with "Hey, do you like comedy and drinking?" lines. Later that night we met Alex, Sara's cousin, for a fantastic Italian dinner in the Theater District. The place was called the Hourglass Tavern, and at each table there was an hourglass on the wall that could be turned over to indicate how long you had until your show. We didn't have a show so we relaxed and enjoyed Alex as she told us about the city and about new things she's seen. That night we swung by Magnolia Bakery, a place we visited in 2010, to get some dessert (carrot cake and key lime cheesecake). We also got the best thing we ate in New York City: Magnolia's world-famous banana pudding. Seriously, it was to die for. Light, fluffy, stuffed with chunks of banana and soft vanilla wafers. (Sara has since learned to make it. Giver her a call to place an order.) On the walk back to the apartment we swung by Rockefeller Center and were surprised to see the plaza was still iced over and was full of ice skaters.

 

The next day is kind of a blur. It was very cold, very misty and very windy. We pretty much froze. Luckily we had purchased some long, thermal underwear which helped combat the chill. The morning started with the Brooklyn Bridge. Sara had seen the bridge before, but never walked over it. It was misty outside and a little foggy, but it was the nicest part of that day. We walked about halfway out and admired all the panoramic views from the famous bridge. From there we walked Downtown to the 9/11 Memorial. We were early for our appointment so we wasted some time at Zucotti Park, the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement (Can you tell I'm a 99-percenter by the raised fist in the photo at right? I checked for NYPD before I did that ... just in case), and then to the Trinity Church cemetery, where early New Yorkers are buried underneath fading tombstones.

At the 9/11 Memorial we weren't sure what to expect. It was a very sad, reverent place to be, but it was also very moving. The memorial consists of two square fountains that sit in the "footprints" of the original World Trade Center towers. The fountains are roughly the same width as the original towers. Around the edge of each fountain are panels that are cut with the names of everyone who died on 9/11, including people on all four planes, at the Pentagon and victims of the 1993 bombing. Underneath the panels is a pool of water that falls three stories into massive pool that makes up the majority of the memorial. Within that pool the water falls yet again, this time into a square hole — the bottom of which can't be seen — in the very center of the fountain. It was strange to see people taking smiling family snapshots at the memorial, and even stranger still to see so many people selling worthless 9/11 knick-knacks on the streets outside the memorial. The memorial also has a museum, but the interiors are not yet complete. We peeked through the windows and saw one of the massive steel tridents that was recovered from Ground Zero. We also saw one of the seven trees that survived the raining metal and debris 10 years ago. Sara and I had no connection to any of the names on the memorial, and we aren't even New Yorkers, but the memorial really touched us both. Just walking on those grounds and looking up into that empty sky was incredibly moving and produced indescribable emotions. If you ever have the chance to visit, please make time.

At that point Sara and I could have caught a subway and hit all the places we wanted to hit. After all, the weather was getting wetter and colder. But Sara had this twinkle in her eye that said, "Forget the subway, we're walking." And walk we did, up Church Street, through SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy, the Lower East Side and East Village. Along the way we stopped at the famous Doughnut Factory, the bakery that started the whole doughnut trend in New York City. It was so cold and wet outside and so hot and humid in the doughnut place that my glasses and the camera lens would not stop fogging up. (Notice the foggy and unfoggy pictures.) By the way, the doughnuts they make are square, and mighty scrumptious. Chinatown was especially interesting: the little storefronts were crammed with all kinds of products, the food smelled revolting and delicious in alternating wafts, and the seafood markets were quite pungent, with huge chunks of dead sea creatures splayed out in iced bins all over the sidewalks.

We eventually did jump on a subway, but only to get up to Midtown where our lunch was waiting for us. The night before we had read in the New York Times about this grilled cheese place called the Melt Shop. As soon as we read about it, we were craving it. We both ordered some gooey-cheesy sandwiches and some tater tots and headed to an indoor pavilion (Melt Shop has no real seating since it's just an order window in a wall) where we could warm up, dry off and massacre our fantastic lunch. It was too wet and rainy to do much else so we headed back down to Time Square to catch an evening movie at that AMC theater we like, the one with all the escalators that makes you think you're seeing your movie in the clouds. After the movie (Wanderlust, by the way, it was funny) we headed home, but not before a burger and shake from Shake Shack — excellent burger!


Our last day we took it very easy. We slept in, did a light lunch at a French place near Jennifer's apartment, then hunted down some black-and-white cookies for our Oscar party that we were having the next evening back home. We didn't find the cookies, but we did find some mini cupcakes from Baked By Melissa and also some mini pies from Pie Face. I also saw the Hello Deli and went inside to buy a water from Rupert Jee, David Letterman's impish little buddy. Rupert was actually manning the counter and looking rather bored, but he was very nice and he didn't price gouge on the bottled water.

 And then it was off to the airport to come home. It all went by so fast, like a blur in our minds. No amount of time is enough to see that city; it's just too big. So no matter when you leave it feels like there are things that still need to be seen, eaten and experienced. It was sad, but we're just glad we got to go. After all, it all came dangerously close to not happening. But we did get to go, we had a blast, and now we get to begin our lives as the wedding phase is officially over, as is something else. You know how the saying goes, "The honeymoon is over."

Tucson before Tucson

Tucson used to be that city from the Beatles' song "Get Back." You know, that city: Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona / For some California grass. After last Saturday, it became that place where elected officials are nearly assassinated. Well, Sara and I were down there the day before, on Friday. After the trip I hadn't had time to do the post-trip blog, and then Rep. Giffords was shot along with many, many others, which meant that posting about our little day trip so soon after a tragedy was kinda silly.

But after tonight's beautiful and eloquent speech by the president, I think it's OK to say that, yes indeed, we took another trip to Tucson. It was a quick one. For a Christmas gift to me, Sara had made an appointment for us to view some original works at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, which houses one of the larger archives of famous photographers' works in the country. It's free to view, but reservations are required. So when we celebrated our Christmas she wrapped a box with a note in it. It was pretty cute of her; and it was a terrific and thoughtful gift. The archive is probably most famous for the work of Ansel Adams, who left the bulk of his work — including original negatives — to the university. (The photo up top is one of Adams' most famous shots.)

I could only pick so many collections of work to look at, so I picked two different sets of original LIFE photographer W. Eugene Smith and also Richard Avedon's famous series called The Family, which featured shots of a much-younger Ralph Nader, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld and a scowling George H.W. Bush, who at the time was running the CIA. It was very cool to see these images in their original forms as printed by Avedon himself. The two goofballs — I say "goofballs" with some affection — who went up into the archives with their matching white gloves and returned to display the photos we picked out were funny guys. One was young and quiet, and he took the verbal abuse from a much older man with a ponytail who talked everyone's ears off.

After Avedon we took a peak at a small fraction of Smith's works, which I enjoyed more than Sara. Smith shot throughout the Pacific during World War II, so his works are mostly battle shots and fatigued soldiers, but later he tackled other subjects in some very famous photo essays. I've always been a fan of Smith's, but to see his original works mounted and captioned (in little typerwritten cards) in his own hands was pretty cool. When we arrived back to Phoenix I jumped on eBay and Amazon to find used copies of his books, which made Sara glare at me: she told me, "You're birthday is right around the corner, jerk!"

After our tour, we jumped back in the car — drove within blocks of what would become a shooting gallery the next day — and headed back home. We were in Tucson for about three hours. What's funny, though, is that this trip's ultimate purpose was to look at photographs, yet we did not take one single photograph during the trip. Weird!

Day Trip to Lovely Wickenburg (Sarcasm!)

About four weeks ago, Sara and I went to Wickenburg, Ariz., with my family for a little day trip to the Vulture Mine, which is this old mine that was abandoned and turned into a tourist attraction. Well, not long after that Sara got pummeled with order after order from EssBee's Bakery, her new bakery endeavor. Needless to say, she's been swamped and has been unable to post of our wonderful trip to Wickenburg. I pestered her and everything, but it was either type or bake ... and she chose wisely.

So now here I am many weeks for a brief photo essay about Wickenburg. Enjoy!

(By the way, all photos are clickable!)

_______________________________

In one of the old mine shacks was a large kitchen. I told Sara to imagine baking in one of these ovens. Her face is her response: "No, thank you."

_______________________________

I told Sara to steal that muffin tin and use it for her customers. The little kleptomaniac STOLE it! (Just kidding.) And that guy with the goofy shadow ... that's me.

_______________________________

I'm kinda bummed, Sara and I didn't have a single photo taken of us together. Instead you get me in my Hero Pose apparently and Sara trying to loosen this old drill press with her bulging muscles.

_______________________________

We found these old cars behind one of the buildings. Sara took a photo of me climbing through the windshield of one of them; I'll spare you that shot.

_______________________________

"Penetrating Oil: A Spring Lubricant"?!?! What were these miners doing at the mine? Well, apparently they weren't taking spelling lessons as you can tell from the "gold paning" sign.

_______________________________

People were actually hung from this tree that Sara is standing under. I told her not to look so happy for the photo, after all we were under a hanging tree.

_______________________________

This is my beautiful niece Bristol. She's six months old and ADORABLE! (And I use that word only sparingly so you know I mean it.) We had to tell her alcohol was bad, the little boozehound. Later, I held her until she fell asleep, which was the best.

_______________________________

There was this one big shed that had a massive diesel engine in it, like the size of a school bus big. Visitors could touch and climb on anything they wanted so Sara and went up top to check the oil and refill the windshield washer fluid. Down below we saw my brother Jason and my dad.

_______________________________

Locked up!

_______________________________

Right after Sara pulled this lever a prisoner somewhere was killed.

_______________________________

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Paul McCartney once lived in Tucson. You hear that and you think, "Wow, a Beatle lived there so it must be pretty nice."

And then you drive into Tucson and you notice the horrible drivers, the streets choked with telephone wires, trash cans on the sidewalks, homeless people panhandling at every gas station and the many seedy neighborhoods. It's right then, at that exact moment, that you realize something: Paul McCartney, that rich SOB, probably never had to come into Tucson. He had a house out in the hills with a private driveway, armed guards, salivating rottweilers and razor wire and pits with sharpened bamboo spears and bengal tigers. Paul didn't live in Tucson; he lived in the desert near it.

And then something else hits you, something more profound: "I liked John better anyway."

I have a whole sad history with Tucson. Some of it I take out on Paul, who lived there with his late wife Linda (and has now since moved away). But I was excited to go back to Tucson and have fun, and do it under much different circumstances with Sara. And fun we had, although very little of it was in Tucson. Much of our adventure took us southeast of Tucson and beyond.

We started at the Reid Park Zoo, Tucson's quaint little animal park in a skeevy neighborhood south of downtown. For a zoo, it's dirt cheap ($7), and it's charming how simple and clean everything is. I'm used to the Wildlife World Zoo, which is wonderful (especially after they added an aquarium). That zoo is very large, very dusty and, in certain places, it looks kinda cheap — although it's totally not cheap at something like $26 a person. So going to Reid Park was a fun alternative. Highlights include the giraffes, the dancing/twitching elephant, the various monkeys, the kissing anteaters and the otters, which we must have watched play in their lagoon for like 15 minutes.

After that, we wandered back to the freeway and started heading further southeast to Benson for our reservation at Kartchner Caverns, which is this huge cave system that nature carved into the desert limestone. These two college students found them in the ’70s and they've been miraculously preserved by the state since the ’90s. They look wonderful, but to keep all them stalagmites and stalactites ticking there are rules, and they are extensive: no cameras, no phones, nothing held in your hands, no food, no drinks, no purses or bags. And if you take your jacket off inside (because it's hot and humid) then be ready to roll it a very special way. Also, as we walked in we were lightly misted to keep any hair, dust or dead skin cells from becoming airborne. (Remember Charlie Brown's friend Pigpen ... he would have been denied entry.) I was going to be a wiseguy and ask the guide if smoking was allowed, but Sara pinched my arm and wagged her finger — she keeps me from embarrassing myself, or maybe just herself. All the rules were worth it, though, because the caves were amazing.

After that, we made a mad dash further south to Tombstone for lunch and an authentic cowboy experience. Within about 15 minutes I was explaining to Sara that Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner both did versions of Wyatt Earp, and that Costner's was more accurate but Russell's was more entertaining. This took place in Big Nose Kate's Saloon, where I had a cowboy burger in an authentic cowboy bar. How authentic? Well, it had the longhorns above the bar, a painting of a naked lady behind the bartender and buckets of ice in the trough-style urinal. Yee-Haw! After eating and walking through Tombstone's storied streets, we caught the daily showing of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which was most definitely not worth the admission price — I think the Doc Holliday actor was legitimately sauced.

We also stopped at the original Boothill Cemetary so we could desecrate some graves with our smiling mugs. The sign on the door reminds people they're at a gravesite so to act accordingly, but that's hard to do when you're standing over a headstone that reads, "Here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a 44, no less, no more." Or the one that says, "Here lies George Johnson, hanged by mistake in 1882. He was right, we was wrong, but we strung him up and now he's gone." Hey, that's like executions in Texas nowadays. And I can't forget to mention the Chinese graves, one of which was marked, "Two Chinks."

After scraping the crap from our boots and spittin' our chaw (kidding) we made another mad dash even further southeast — damn near Mexico, hombre — to Bisbee, an old mining community. It was here that we donned yellow slickers, hardhats, leather belts (kinky!) and flashlights to ride a little train way down into the Queen Mine. After the mine closed two decades ago, it has since been turned into a tourist attraction with daily tours. I heard about it from my brother and his wife — thanks, Jay and Char — so Sara and I wanted to give it a whirl. It was a lot of fun. The mine was cold, but our tour guide warmed us up with his colorful narration, which was intentionally drab and monotone. He said he retired to the Honeydews — "Honey, do this," and "Honey, do that ..." He was actually a miner from the mine; and I think he missed his job. Looking up the mine on Wikipedia after our trip, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was in some of the photos on the page. Midway through the tour he pointed to this tall mine car with two seats on the top and said that was the miner's bathroom, and then he offered everyone the chance to stick their hands down inside. Only Sara took him up on the offer — "Hey, look there's candy down there," she said.

After that we toured Bisbee for a little bit, then headed back to Tucson where we refueled on gas, pie at a desserts-only diner, and I dropped some 5-Hour Energy for the two-hour drive back to Avondale. It was a whirlwind trip, but so worth it.