Yes, we are in New York City. Happy to be back to one of my favorite places. We are here for the Gay & Sober Men conference – Ash’s first time, me returning for the first time since 2019. That began yesterday, Thursday, June 27. We will leave on Monday for DC and finish the week there. Ash grew up there but I’ve never really been except for a couple of weekend conferences 20 years ago.
Our flight was for 11:15pm Wednesday night, to get us here around 7:30am Thursday. But it was delayed 13 hours – thankfully we were notified just as we left the house, first of a 1.5 hour delay that was then extended – so didn’t get to the hotel last night until about 9:30pm, missing the opening speaker meeting. Oh well. We’re not big on speaker meetings anyway and are planning on skipping those and seeing what shows we can fit in on rush or lottery tickets.
We had a small amount of time to kill when we got to the Sacramento airport, so stopped into the Escape lounge. It’s pretty new and we’d just learned that the Priority Pass would get us in so we figured we’d check it out. There wasn’t much to it but it’s nice to have. We didn’t eat anything, just had some coffee and then it was time to go.
We had a direct flight in first class, and of course have Zeus with us. We were served lunch on the plane. Ash had a chicken dish, I had a quinoa salad, both quite good.
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After an uneventful flight, we got our luggage and took a Lyft to our hotel, the Westin Times Square on 43th St at 8th Ave. Since it’s a Marriott property, Ash figured we’d get a better deal booking directly instead of using the conference rate. And we did. We learned just before we left that they upgraded us – for free – to a junior suite. It has a nice living area in addition to the bedroom. I’m sitting at that table as I type.
We are on the 42nd floor (of 45) with south facing windows. I was a little surprised to see the Empire State Building, which is at 34th St and 6th Ave, but you can see the tip just beyond other buildings to our left. It’s pretty all lit up.
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We literally dropped our bags and headed out for something to eat. My mouth was set for pizza, but the area we were in was a mess of people because the theaters were just getting out. So we went over to 9th Ave instead – one block over makes a huge difference – and stopped at 46th St. I can’t tell if it’s called “I love NY Pizza” or Vinny’s Pasta Kitchen. They did have a few types of pasta. But Ash got a slice of cheese pizza, me a pepperoni, and we shared some mozzarella sticks. Everything hit perfectly.
The theme of this year’s GSM conference is SuperHeroes, and lots of things are being held at St. Luke’s on 46th, just the other side of 8th Ave. Since we were still a little wired from our trip and still on California time, we decided to go to the Midnight Meeting. And were glad we did. There were only about 40 guys there – out of 400 attending the conference – but it was a nice, easy way to meet a few and we were glad we went.
We are off to a good start. We have a couple of workshops we are attending today and will see about seeing a show. We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on tickets so committed to only seeing what we could get on rush or lottery. Time to enter some more lotteries, then. Come back tomorrow to see how that turned out…
(PS: I’m playing with some new formatting options I’ve learned recently, so bear with me as I practice on you!)
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Off and running!! You guys are both such inspirations in sobriety. The promises in real time!!