Our Big Day

Our Memorial Day weekend with Eller is over, and quite frankly it couldn’t have been any better.  The weather cooperated brilliantly, with nary a raindrop falling all weekend.  We were able to take full advantage of the sunshine, especially on our busy Saturday.  In case you didn’t follow Eller’s more than dozen tweets of the activities, we captured some scenes on our respective Flip cameras to help tell the story.

We started the day with a bike ride affectionately dubbed Tour de New York, which allowed us to ride from the southern edgeo of the island all the way up to the Upper West Side, where we grabbed a quick lunch before turning the bikes back in at Columbus Circle.  From there, we made our way to Roosevelt Island for the Improv Everywhere Mp3 Experiment.

This event perhaps deserves a bit of explanation, if for no other reason than to reassure everyone that we weren’t caught up in some super weird, cult-like ceremony.  As part of the annual event, we downloaded an Mp3 file ahead of time and synchronized watches so we could press “play” at exactly 4pm.  Over the next 45 minutes we followed the instructions heard through our iPods and participated in a number of individual and group activities with the hundreds of other participants.  The grand finale involved a mass gathering in a large field on the southern edge of Roosevelt Island, a subsequent short dance party, mock war with inflatable swords, and the felling of a mythical “wolf” which I happened to capture on camera.

If the whole thing sounds completely strange, well, it was.  But it was also strangely interesting and fun all at the same time, with a few pieces of unintentional comedy gold thrown in for good measure.

After the experiment we hustled back to the apartment and quickly got ready for Hannah’s birthday dinner at a French restaurant in the Lower East Side.  The highlight of the evening was the karaoke bar after dinner, where we belted out favorites from the last few decades in celebration of Hannah.

The big day ended well after midnight, with all three of us begging for a good night’s sleep - a good night’s sleep after an absolutely fantastic day.

Eller Visits NYC from Zack Mansfield on Vimeo.