Girls Weekend 2026, Wednesday, October 14. New York City

Girls Weekend 2026.  Wednesday, October 14. New York City

Lori writes:

Good morning!  We have, once again, awakened to a beautiful morning.  Unfortunately, Kathi apparently did not sleep well last night for some reason so was in need of a cup of coffee this morning.  The Keurig machine here has been very temperamental and Kathi wasn’t able to get it to work this morning, so I took a walk down to Milk and Pull to get us both some coffee.  Once back, I set to work on the journaling for our Monday adventures, along with editing the photos I took from that day, while Kathi worked on Tuesday’s journaling.  We were both able to wrap up our journaling then we got ourselves ready to leave for our lunch date with Kathi’s friend Jeff.  We were out the door around 11:40 to catch the A train with a transfer to the 4 and 5 (which we had not yet ridden), then a short walk to the restaurant.  There was actually a light rain falling for our walk but it wasn’t enough rainfall to warrant raincoats.  Jeff was already seated and waiting for us at the restaurant, Pershing Square.  We all placed our orders and Kathi and Jeff caught up a bit on one another’s lives having not seen one another for 44 years!!  We then talked about our Girls Weekend trips and how they began and have evolved over the past 29 years.  Jeff told us a bit about his life and career here and shared some stories with us, too, about one of the performers from last night. Marilyn Maye.  What an amazing story.  She is 98 (yes, you read that correctly) years old and STILL PERFORMS almost nightly as well as coaching and directing cabaret shows by day. She was Johnny Carson’s favorite singer and appeared on his television show 76 times.  What a career!

Once we finished lunch it was time for us to leave to make our 2pm appointment with an escape room.  We used to bowl on every Girls Weekend, but that has now been replaced with escape rooms.  We were not able to do one last year in Homer, Alaska because there were none available, so we were excited to do one this year.  It was a challenging room with a great story.  We were on a subway train that had been hijacked by a former engineer, who jumped off the train and left it speeding out of control.  Our mission was to figure out how to activate the emergency systems to stop the train before it crashed.  Once again, we failed the mission, but were only 3 clues away.  DANG!!

As we were leaving the escape room there were wonderful aromas wafting through an open doorway to the kitchen of a nearby bakery where, on our way in, we could see the bakers working with a giant pile of chocolate chip cookie dough. We, of course, had to stop in and get a couple of cookies (still warm) along with an iced maple latte for Kathi and a hot matcha tea with oat milk for Lori. Delicious!!

As we were walking to the subway station, a shop full of buttons caught my eye and we just HAD to go in.  What a unique place!  Mostly buttons, but also carries zippers and zipper pulls.  We wandered around in there for 20-30 minutes and came away with some unique buttons. Fun!!

(Botani Trimmings and Lampo Zipper NYC)

We then continued on to the subway station to make our way to the final scheduled event for Girls Weekend NYC,  Harlem Hallelujah at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church.  I was very excited about this event when I found it and bought tickets immediately.  It was everything I could have hoped for.  One thing I found very interesting about the evening was that as we were waiting for the concert to begin, I looked around and noticed that everyone seated in front of us was white.  So, I turned around and checked out all of the people seated behind us and they were all white, too. We were in a church in the middle of Harlem and Kathi appeared to be the ONLY black person in the audience.  The performers and nearly all of the church staff helping with event were black, but the audience……white.  AND, most were speaking foreign languages.  Fascinating!  Once the event finished, we used the facilities then made our way to the nearby subway station and headed “home”.  

Upon arriving “home”, we both did some packing, since tonight is our last night here (NOOOOOOO!!!!), ate a little, then did our regular evening routine of journaling, photo editing and sharing and catching up on all the email we missed out on while out and about.  We also decided that we would watch another episode or two of Blue Ridge before turning in for the night.

Tomorrow we travel back home and rejoin the rest of the world, having enjoyed our time together and taking many happy memories with us.