Up I arose well before the crack of dawn so I could drive to Silverdale to pick up Dana on the way to Dar’s house in Bremerton. A cycling friend, Pam, had kindly offered to drive us the rest of the way to the airport. We had an uneventful flight to JFK, the first leg of our scheduled 10 flights. Plane was packed to the gills as they always seem to be now, but I had a new, secret weapon against the usual bedlam – noise canceling earphones! Heavens, what an invention! I successfully managed to totally block all the craziness and easily listened to two movies. And, boom! We were landing. Well worth every penny. W grabbed a cab and off we went into Manhattan, staying in a place off  7th and W 55th. We settled in, then wandered out to see about dinner. The first place we saw was a diner on the corner that made us immediately think of Seinfeld. We ended up at Rosie O’Grady’s, where we had a lovely supper with wine to celebrate the start of our journey. We’re such rubes from Kitsap County that we marveled at the number of people wandering about late in the evening. Back to the hotel we  went, armed with maps to plot out our tourist route for the next few days.