Mystery Date Night

My boyfriend has many pitfalls, the main one, of course, being that he has an emoji for a face. But recently he has been KILLING the date-game, and I must give credit where credit is due. You may remember less than a month ago, when he surprised me with 4th row tickets to see The Book of Mormon in preparation for our trip to Utah. TBH, I didn’t think he could beat that.

He has asked me early last week for a “date night” on Friday. Color me impressed. That was already a huge improvement. Pre-planning a date? Allowing me more than 3 days’ notice to put it in my always-full social calendar? I was excited.

Friday morning, he texted me while I was at work and said, “I checked your calendar. You don’t have anything tomorrow morning, right?” That’s right, ladies and gents, we share Google calendars. We are the COOLEST couple of all time. But honestly, I don’t know what we would do if we didn’t; I have too many things going on! Luckily, I had nothing going on the next day, since the UF Football game was canceled due to Hurricane Irma.

Anyway, my interest was piqued. A date that requires no plans the next morning? Were we going on a trip? We don’t have a car! Were we going out super late? Sleep No More? He knows I get scared way too easily for that shiz.

I got home from work and he told me to pack a bag. SO EXCITING. I packed an outfit, a gator outfit for the next day (it doesn’t matter if they aren’t playing, #InAllKindsOfWeather), a swimsuit (you never know) and some makeup. Then we headed out to our chariot (aka our Via, SIGN UP WITH MY CODE emily5s6e for $10 off!) and he still kept it a mystery as we headed downtown. I cheated a little by looking on the Via’s GPS, but all I cleaned from my snooping was that we were going super far downtown.

We arrived at the Hilton Millennium hotel just as the sun was setting. My emoji-bf has many great qualities, one big one being he is a Hilton Honors Gold member, so we got the highest room available, on the 48^th floor. The room was overlooking the Freedom Tower, the 9/11 Memorial reflecting pool, and the Oculus. I’d argue there is no better view within Manhattan. The best view of Manhattan is from New Jersey, but really, WHO GOES THERE!? The view of the Freedom Tower could not have been more timely, the weekend before 9/11. 16 years later and I still have so many feelings.

We settled into our room in the third-best Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, and checked out the room service menu. How do I know it was the third-best? Because emoji-man was very upset when he looked it up and found out. Turns out the Waldorf Astoria is #1 and The Conrad is #2, in case these things matter to you.

Anyway, the emoji-BF decided on this mystery date because of an Amex offer (more on his and my credit card churning another day), which said that if you spend $300 at a Hilton Hotel, you get $350 back. FREE MONEY! MY FAVORITE KIND! We needed to figure out a way to spend $40 more to get the offer, so we perused the room service menu for items to “fit the bill,” literally. Unfortunately, this is NYC and room service, a lethal combination. Nothing on the menu was that cheap. So we started looking for other options.

We decided to dine at Osteria della Pace, a southern Italian restaurant inside Eataly. The food was delicious and I had a glass of no. 139 dry rose cider, which was sort of like a sparkling rose champagne. Yum! What is one of the worst things that can happen while dining downtown within one of the World Trade Center buildings? OH YEAH. THE ALARM CAN START GOING OFF. And sure enough, it did. In the middle of appetizers, the lights started strobing and an announcement started. I’ve never seen New Yorkers shut up so quickly in my life. It was quieter than a subway at 5 am when everyone is still asleep. The only problem was, no one could understand the announcement! It was static-y and the guy speaking had a very strong accent. After about 30 seconds of heart-pounding panic, we heard one word, “disregard,” and there was a collective huge sigh of relief. Besides that, dinner was DELISH.

We decided to stop at the newly-opened Oculus on the way back to the hotel, since we had never been there before. We actually had no idea what it was, besides that it looked like an exoskeleton of an ENORMOUS animal. And that is cost a sh*tton of money to build (first budgeted at $2 billion, but rose to $3.9 billion by the end). We entered, and I was immediately dizzy. It’s crazy-looking! In between fighting people for a space to take a selfie – this is a V popular place for selfies, go figure – we realized it was a train station. It connects the NJ Path to the NYC subway. As I said before, I clearly never go to NJ since I did not know this. It smells there. Ok, it smells in NYC, too. But I digress.

After our selfie, we went back to the hotel where we watched parts of 3 different movies on 3 different HBO channels. Remember life before HBO Now and Netflix? Where you had to tune into a movie in the middle? Those were rough times. Anyway, we also ordered a bottle of wine to reach our $300 minimum. The bottle was $45 (we are SO fancy), but with the extra added fees, it was $62. Those hotels are fee-machines. Oh well. We didn’t even open it, but we sure felt fancy getting it to our room! If anyone wants to come over to our apartment to share, no guarantees on quality.

We went to sleep and planned to wake up to swim in the pool. Unfortunately, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, i.e. we overslept. We packed our bags up and headed down to the checkout.

After following my Snapchat/Instagram story and seeing the hotel view, no less than three of my friends texted me asking if I was getting engaged. To set everyone straight, I definitely did not get engaged. But I DID have an awesome night with my emoji-faced boyfriend. And for the record, mister, you have officially set the bar incredibly high if you ever do plan to “pull out all the stops” in the future. WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE. I sure hope you have another Amex Offer in the pipeline! In maybe a year. Or maybe more. 😉