#2,520 Croissant Crawl + Party.

Oh goodness, y’all. So tired. I can barely move. Tonight’s writing will be upstaged by photos. It’s quantity, not quality tonight!

We woke up to the blustery, cold and rainy New York fall day that I’ve romanticized basically my entire life. In high school I probably imagined myself exploring the city’s coziest bakeries and coffee shops and book stores in my thickest, coziest sweater along with my burly, bearded boyfriend with David Gray’s Please Forgive Me setting the soundtrack, and so this morning, with nothing on our agenda until the afternoon, we did exactly that. We lived out my lifelong fantasy of big city cold and rainy living. In fact, let’s go ahead and hit play on that song right here.

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I’ve wanted to have breakfast at Buvette for SO LONG and today was the day! We tasted the almond brioche and waffle sandwich…

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Which inspired us to go around trying other great croissants in the city since a really good, fresh croissant is possibly my favorite food. Next up was Maison Kayser with a hot cup of Earl grey tea.

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Then a short break at The Strand, NYC’s most famous bookstore, where I bought this book to remind me of today.

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And then there was a cup of delicious creamy tomato soup from Hale & Hearty, followed by more exploration in Little Italy (in search of the restaurant where we once had an accidental private dinner with Vinny Vella from all the mob movies on our honeymoon though we can’t remember the name of it to save our lives) and along the way we stopped by my favorite Italian pastry shop in the city, Caffe Roma… Where we left with one croissant in a box to try later and compare to the French varieties we sampled this morning.

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Soon it was time for our dinner reservation at Il Cantinori, our decidedly favorite Italian restaurant in Manhattan where I had maybe the world’s best bucatini cacio e pepe with their incredible, fresh homemade tomato sauce. The service is always so nice there, and it’s fun to eat where Carrie Bradshaw’s ill-fated 35th birthday almost was, and where the cast of The Sopranos had their first big magazine interview after season 1 wrapped filming.

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And finally, we ended the night with our only friends in NYC who all gathered at Lindsey’s office in Gramercy with the most jaw dropping rooftop views of the city.

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I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for the experiences the Lord is seeing fit to give us in this season of life. I’ll have so much to be thankful in my prayers tonight and always.