Elephants in midtown? God, I love this city.

Honest to goodness, how many times in your life are you going to see elephants casually walk a city block, let alone the width of Manhattan?

Well, if you live in New York, friends, it's an annual occurrence. Each trip around the sun, the circus returns to Madison Square Garden, enabling well-informed, yet ambitious folks to see (what generally would be considered) the unexpected. Yes, city-slicking elephants.

Receiving much-appreciated advanced notice, I took joy, no, no - glee - in attempting to recruit people for this event. Being that it did occur in the early hours of Tuesday morning, my success rate was much higher than anticipated, meaning, more than just me. My two main accomplices in this endeavor were my dear roommates, Rachel and Lauren.

Learning our lesson from our Snowscrapers experience, we all bundled up and made three cups of hot cocoa in travel mugs for our journey uptown. The irony? We set foot outside and it's oh, about 40 degrees. Irony part two? We were all quite comfortable. I had my big Russian hat on and was happy.

After a rambunctious trip to the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel, the three of us settled in our spots and awaited the elephants. Amidst many elephant jokes throughout the growing crowd, another recruit, Mr. Kiscadden, made his way toward us. I also want to take a moment to say kudos to Rach and Ryan for coming out despite looming work in the morning.

Dallying after the line had passed, we realized that we could probably catch up to them... if we ran... across Manhattan... at 1 in the morning - let me remind you... in pursuit of elephants.

Three girls bundled like Eskimos (one with camera gear) and a large, tall dude sprinting from 2nd Ave. to 7th Ave. The dialogue that ensued was priceless, oh and another tip-of-the-hat to Ryan for being a man and running with Rachel's magenta purse. Hysterical and easily one of my best New York moments to date. Our evening ended with a lovely late night stroll from Midtown to home in the Financial District.

This city is one of the greatest places on Earth. Did I mention that we ran across the WIDTH of Manhattan at 1 a.m. chasing elephants? I'm still so pumped... and it's Wednesday...