Home for Christmas!

It's 4:15am and I'm leaving for the airport in 45 minutes....haven't slept a wink because I've been scrambling to finish packing, but I can't wait to go home for Christmas! This is the first time in 5 years that I will be home for the Holidays! I was lucky enough to have my personal day off on Christmas Eve and we don't have any shows Christmas, so I decided to be crazy and add one more city to this tour! I'm bringing my computer with me so I'm hoping to get to some good blogging time in on my layover. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!! :)

Pics from Cinci

Here is the riverboat we took on Thanksgiving....it was the Belle of Cincinnati

I'm wearing the captain's hat and sitting in the captain's chair!
My friend Megan and I were dared to take a pic with our animal handlers from the show....they definitely won the prize for strangest get-up at Thanksgiving dinner! Check out the feather in the guy's hat to the left.....oh ya, and the best part are the cowboy boots that you cant see in the pic. These studs are the ones who take care of our camels and sheep!!

Now don't judge- this is definitely the messiest my room has gotten on the tour- I just thought it was funny because I've been trying to take pics of all my hotel rooms and I forgot with this city to take the pic when I first walked in and the room is all nice and neat....this night I was creatively re-packing for our flight to Baltimore because I knew some of my bags were overweight!!

Cincinnati! ( this was 6 cities ago...)

Our return to Cincinnati was great fun! If you remember, we were there the last week of October doing final tech rehearsals. It felt neat to come back to a place that was familiar...almost like we were home again! The first day back was Thanksgiving and our company management team organized Thanksgiving dinner for us on a river boat cruise! ( We had NO shows on Thanksgiving- this is the first time in 5 years that I didn't preform on Thanksgiving....and it was great!!) We had the whole second floor of the boat reserved for Radio City people...half of them I didn't even recognize because we have soooo many crew/ tech guys I've never even seen! The weather was a perfect sunny 60 degree day. Dinner was okay, good enough, but the pumpkin pie was delicious! They actually ran out of pumpkin pie by the time I went to get dessert, so I asked our waitress if there was any left anywhere on the boat....so she was sneaky and snagged a few pies from another floor! Thanks goodness because my Thanksgiving wouldn't have been complete without pumpkin pie! After the river boat cruise ended a bunch of use went to the movie theater to let our dinners settle. I went to see Twilight with a few other fans of the books and unfortunately we were really disappointed. Maybe I had my expectations too high....or maybe it was that too may things I'd imagined and pictured while reading the book were totally wrong in the movie, I don't know? Anyway, we were determined not to leave the movie theater disappointed, so we stayed to see Four Christmases. Since we were going round 2 for movies, we thought a round 2 of food was necessary, so we grabbed a huge popcorn and large sodas and settled in for movie #2. Four Christmases was cute and funny and it made me laugh....I love when Vince Vaughn rambles on!
It was back to the grind of doing shows for the next few days, but it was so nice because we were already familiar to the backstage area and we had our same dressers back who were really excited to see us. My friend Bridgette, from the baton world, came to see the show with her Mom and Aunt and they all loved it. I took them backstage and they were having fun trying on some of my hats and stuff.
It was great/ dangerous to be right across the street from a Saks for Black Friday shopping! I did some minor damage with a cute top and a sensible pair of heels. I started to feel a little under the weather by Sunday, which couldn't have come at a better time because it was my day off, so I stayed in bed and read about 3/4 of the third Twilight book. ( I have since finished the book, and *spoiler alert* I was dying on the proposal chapter...it was just too sweet and prefect :)
Downtown Cincinnati was cute, it almost felt like a tiny New York City because there was a big tree and ice skating rink out in front of our hotel that was like Rockefeller Plaza. We walked everywhere, and there were cute restaurants and shops and Starbucks on many corners. Maybe that's why it felt so familiar?? Oh ya, and if anyone ever goes to Cincinnati you must go to Nada- an excellent Mexican fusion restaurant with crazy good mac and cheese- and Graeter's Ice Cream- yummy & delicious family owned Cincinnati ice cream....I recommend peppermint ice cream with hot fudge! YUM!

It's late...

Hi! I know I said I was going to try to get caught up this weekend, but I didn't have internet in my hotel room again! grrr!! I'm slummin it in the lobby using the free wireless :( We are leaving Birmingham tomorrow at 6am, so in six hours I will be on a bus heading to Bossier City, Louisiana! I still have to finish packing and get ready for bed, but I thought I'd do a quick re-cap of beautiful Birmingham....
Well, the audiences were fantastic here and we even had a few shouters in the house. This one older man that was sitting directly in front of me in the kickline at the end of New York at Christmas today threw his hands in the air and shouted, "AMAZING! JUST AMAZING!" It was pretty funny. Friday I landed badly in the jump split in Ragdolls and ended up possibly straining the muscle in the bottom of my foot. The arch of foot has been swollen and it hurts to walk and dance on it. The athletic trainers taped it up really well today and it seemed to cut the pain a little. It's not hurt badly enough to call out of a show, which I'm grateful for because in my five years of being a Rockette I've never missed a show...and I'd hate for something to stand in my way of my perfect attendance! The A.T.'s think it will get better with icing in between shows and rest. I hope they are right! As far as fun things to do or see in Birmingham, my list is pretty short. I was poo pooing the idea that Birmingham was a cool place so I slept in on Friday, my only good sight-seeing day. I did go to one of the "Original Pancake Houses" with the girls and I got yummy pecan pancakes with sliced bananas on top. I was told that the "Original Pancake House" is a southern thing so I'm going to count that as my touristy thing for Birmingham. We also went to dinner in this historic district called Five Points South. It had a bunch of beautiful old churches, cute restaurants and neat art deco looking buildings. All the buildings in this district are from 1880- 1930. I didn't like our hotel in Birmingham. It was noisy because the hotel is an atrium style and there was basketball teams and cheerleaders staying here this weekend for a tournament and they were annoying and loud!! It felt the whole hotel echoed. Overall my Birmingham experience has been luke warm...I definitely wouldn't return, but I didn't hate it either. Anyway, I'll have pics later, but now I probably should go to bed!

Pics from Dayton

Here are some of the girls from Joyce's dance studio that came and saw the show. The question I was asked over and over from the girl's that night was "How did you learn to kick so high?" Haha!! All I could say was "I don't know, you just do it?!"

My return to Dayton, Ohio

Dayton, Ohio was our seventh city to hit on the tour. We were there less than 30 hours, we rolled in on the bus at 3:30 one day and left the next day after our last show about 9:00. We preformed at the Nutter Center Arena, the same arena I competed at in the 1997 & 2000 National Baton competition! It was funny returning to an arena in such a random part of the country that I had already preformed at. It looked the same, maybe a little bit nicer then I'd remembered it- and there was no practice gym with baton twirlers crowding the floor or judges in black suits- just our stage! I met up with 2 baton professionals while in town, Julie and Joyce. They took me to lunch before they came and saw the show. Joyce actually owns a dance studio in Dayton, and she brought her whole studio...there were about 65 people that came to see the show! I came out before the show in my 12 Days costume and did a little meet and greet with the girls, signed autographs and answered questions about Rockettes. After our last show we hopped onto our bus and drove an hour to our next city, Cincinnati, so that we could wake up on Thanksgiving and not have to travel. It was fun to travel at night- we were all wide awake, normally we are sleepy on the bus. I'd picked up a Christmas Mad Libs book at the gift shop in Grand Rapids the week before that I was dying to do, so the girls and I did Christmas mad libs the whole way there. It's been a while since I've done mad libs- but it was great fun! We laughed so hard!!

Playing catch up- Detroit

Oh my gosh- Detroit seemed like so long ago! It was 4 cities ago! That's how terribly behind I am. My goal is to get caught up this weekend. Quick update- we are flying to Birmingham, AL tomorrow! City #11! The tour is headed for the South. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this means warmer weather!! It's been so chilly, all I'm asking for is a sensible 60 degrees :) We are flying there, this means annoying group travel day...about 100 of us Radio City people all on the same flight hanging at the airport. We make the lines super long for everything- check in, security...even the lines at the good airport food places! We have a 2 hour layover at the Chicago airport and we have bet going that our flight will be delayed out of Chicago because EVERYTHING is always delayed through that airport! We get our buses back in Birmingham- and I never thought I'd say this- but I'm happy to get the bus back! It's just easier to hope on a bus and sleep. We've been in Columbus, OH the last 2 days. I really like it here. There are lots of fun things to do hear. More on that later...first I'll give you the skinny on the Motor City.

We were in Detroit for a while, about 5 days. The city was kinda grouse and scary and not a ton to do in walking distance. The only thing that was really close was Greek Town, this street with all these yummy Greek restaurants and a Greek casino. It was colorful and busy and I ate saganaki for the first time. Saganaki is this Greek dish, its just cheese on a plate then they light it on fire right in front of you and yell "OPA!" Flaming hot cheese spread across pita bread is irresistible! I loved it! Other fun activities I enjoyed while in Detroit was shopping at an amazing mall! We had a cast day off there so our company managers coordinated a shopping trip one day so that the buses could take us because the mall was about 20 minutes away from our hotel. It was the best mall I've ever been to hands down. I about had a panic attack in it though because there were SO many shops! It was actually 2 malls that was connected by a long sky mall. I spent the majority of my time in one of my favorite stores, lululemon!! I also went to this awesome chiropractor that my friend, Erin- who is from Detroit, hooked us up with. The chiropractor had this crazy machine that "read" your bone alignment with this gun thing. After he zapped you, a diagram came up on the computer showing me just how messed up I truly was. It was fascinating to see the before and after alignments and the differences the adjustment made. I felt great that first show back after my adjustment, however I'm pretty sure I went back to my normal busted self after that first jump split! The final night in Detroit, the girls and I traded our backstage passes for tickets and went and saw the Broadway touring production of Irvine Berlin's "White Christmas" at the historic Fox Theater. It was so much fun to watch another Christmas show! And I love "White Christmas!" The cast was awesome and I was overwhelmed with how beautiful and interesting the Fox Theater was. One last funny story about our 6th city. During one if the shows we had a small fire on stage! During the "New York at Christmas" number we have little fireworks on stage at the end. I guess one of the fireworks got too close or a wire intercepted our pretty red show curtain and it caught fire right there on stage! (One of the girls said she saw someone in the front pointing at the stage at the end of the number, but she didnt think she would ever be pointing at a fire!!) I was clueless, as was most of the other Rockettes, and we finished the number without knowing anything was wrong. As we were backstage changing into our next number, Santa's, we heard our stage manager over the loud speaker saying something about a momentary hold on the show. They stopped the show for 15 minutes as they fixed the curtain and put the fire out.....then we went on with the show! Luckily it wasn't a big fire and nothing got seriously damaged because I guess they had some flame retardant on the curtain already. It was exciting though, it shook things up a bit!

It's bed time for me...goodnight!

This is a pic at the arena that we preformed at....this is a Hall of Fame wall for the Detroit Hockey team...I got lucky that my name was "sort of" on there!

Who knew I was a good hockey player! :)

This is one of the views of the lobby at the Fox Theater. This is no way captures the extreme detail and beauty of this theater. The theater looked like what a Hindu temple would be like.

"OPA!!" Amy, Nita and I are outside of Pegasus, one of the Greek places we ate at in Greek town.

so behind...

I'm so behind in my blogging! We just got Baltimore today, which means I'm 3 cities behind! I'm going to Charm City Cakes tomorrow.....cant wait! First impression of Baltimore is really good, they have a lot of stuff to do! We only had one show today, after two days off...it felt really weird, my body was all fresh and my legs felt weightless. Weird!! I guess I know the feeling won't last long because it will be back to busted body tomorrow, honestly I think I'm more comfortable with that. Some of my friends from the NY gold cast came down tonight for our show. It was awesome to see them!! I didn't want them to leave! Anyway, just thought I'd do a quick blog. I need to head to bed soon, but my room is freezing cold and I started the fourth Twilight book and I think it's calling my name......

Check this out!

Check out this video...it's a promo video that was created the days before we opened when we were in Cincinnati for final tech. It's really cool- its talks about everything!

http://www.cincinnatiusa.com/Attractions/detail.asp?AttractionID=438