From the time I was in braces, I have been fascinated by New York City. I was introduced to the Big Apple in June before the eighth grade, when I took a vacation with a friend’s family. In high school, I went with my dance teacher, who bravely took a gaggle of girls to attend dance classes alongside Broadway hopefuls. In college, I went by train after taking in a West Point football game with my roommate, who was dating a cadet. I have gone to NYC only a handful of times since, but it remains one of my favorite places to explore.

I was able to re-discover the city this past May, when the IN staff took a break to celebrate our magazine’s fifth anniversary. I savored every moment, from shopping sophisticatedly down Fifth Avenue to haggling my way through Chinatown. We took in the theater; saw the sights; ate and drank too much. My favorite moment was meeting Katie Couric and Matt Lauer when we got on TV one morning, just outside the Today show. I even brushed elbows with CNN’s hunky Anderson Cooper in the Time Warner building. The trip reminded me, all over again, how extraordinary New York City truly is. Anything seems possible there.

Fast forward to Memorial Day weekend back here at home. My family was invited by close friends to spend a day on their beautiful boat on the Tchefuncte River. Early on, as we traveled past the quaint restaurants lining the water’s edge in Madisonville, I smelled the unmistakable scent of a crawfish boil. Later, we ventured out into the lake to retrieve our friend’s crab traps, which would yield dozens of specimens for us to feast upon that night. And after a lazy day in the southern sun, when we pulled back into the river’s inlet, past the cypress trees tilting in the late afternoon breeze, my kids began to search for the infamous alligator that lives just under the boat’s dock. It was then that I realized that there’s nowhere in the world that comes close to what we have here at home.

The way I figure it, catching a glimpse of that Tchefuncte ’gator is more exciting than any celebrity sighting you’ll ever find in NYC.

Congratulations to Carol Carroll of Bush, the winner of last month’s Word Search!