New York Trip: Part Two

 

Day Two

We woke up early again on our second morning in New York, packed up our bags, and then took the subway from Queens over to another hotel in Lower Manhattan (in the financial district, where Wall Street is), where we had reservations for the next 3 nights. 

We dropped our bags off at the hotel and then walked around Battery Park (at the very bottom tip of Manhattan).  We had tickets to go on a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty at 10:30, but it was only around 8:30.  We decided to get in line for an earlier ferry, and I’m so glad we did – we ended up leaving for Liberty Island on the 9:00 ferry, which saved us so much time. 

The museum and the inside of the statue were closed for repairs, but we were still able to walk all around the island and take pictures.  It was pretty amazing to be so close up to the Statue of Liberty. 

View of Lower Manhattan from Liberty Island:

Next we got back on the ferry and went over to Ellis Island (this is embarrassing, but before we were planning for this trip, I actually didn’t know there were two separate islands – I thought there was only Ellis Island, and that’s where both the Statue of Liberty and also the immigration museum were.  I didn’t even know about Liberty Island.  Tristan thinks this is hilarious – he can’t even imagine how I got through school without knowing this). 

On the ferry going to Ellis Island.  We stood right in the front and it was super windy!  At first we were the only ones standing out there in front, and I joked with Daniel that we should stand up on the top front thing (the bow?) and do the Titanic pose and I could yell “I’m flying!”  He, of course, rolled his eyes, but then a few minutes later a girl came up to me and asked if I would take a picture of her and her boyfriend pretending like they were in Titanic.  I had to try not to laugh the whole time I was taking their picture.  But Daniel did take this windy hair picture of me, so I can pretend like I’m Chewbacca from Star Wars.

The Ellis Island Immigration Museum.  We didn’t spend a lot of time there, but it was really interesting.

On the ferry back to Manhattan:

We got back to Battery Park around 11:00, and I couldn’t believe how long the line was for people waiting to go out to Liberty Island – just the line to get into the security check wrapped all the way around the block.  We were so glad we went super early – if you ever go to New York and you want to see the Statue of Liberty, that’s what I would recommend. 

After that we decided to walk to Brooklyn for lunch.  We hadn’t planned on doing that until our last day, but since we had extra time, we decided to do it early and free up our last day.  We walked up through the financial district and saw Wall Street and the big bull statue (which we didn’t get a picture of, because there’s a line for that).

Here is a pretty little garden and fountain we saw on our way.  The funny thing about New York is that because it is so big with so many tall buildings we would always come up on huge things that we hadn’t known were there because they were hidden by everything else (for example, the huge building in the picture below – we didn’t even see it until we were right there in front of it.  In Texas that would look like a giant castle that you could see for miles and miles).                 

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.  I was really excited about this. 

Looking back at Manhattan from the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.  That other bridge is the Manhattan Bridge.  That tall building is the Empire State Building.

This is Grimaldi’s, a famous pizza place that we were planning on eating lunch at.  The line just to get in went all the way down the street, though, so we decided to not eat there. 

Instead, we got some ice-cream cones at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (good) and walked down by the river.  The weather was perfect.  It really was perfect the whole trip –  comfortable jacket weather in the morning and evening, and warm but not too hot all during the day.  And not a drop of rain. 

Then we took the subway back to Manhattan and ate a late lunch there. There is an area near Wall Street that is just filled with tons of food carts around lunch time. We went to Alan’s Falafel cart and got a really good falafel sandwich, and then a fresh fruit smoothie from the next cart over. I kind of want to work on Wall Street just so I could eat that for lunch every day.

After lunch we walked back to our hotel and got changed – we were planning on going to the theater later that night, and we didn’t want to have to come back to the hotel. 

After we changed we went over to see the 9/11 Memorial.  It is free, but you have to have reservations.  This was one of my favorite things in New York – it really is so amazing.  There are two big reflecting pools with waterfalls flowing into them and a hole in the center where the water disappears.  Each reflecting pool is almost one acre, and they sit in the exact spots where the North and South towers of the World Trade Center were.  The new World Trade Center is still being built, but it is almost finished.  It is the tall building in the middle of the picture below– you can’t see the top, but when it is finished, it will be 1776 feet high (the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere).  The smaller building on the bottom right is the 9/11 Memorial Museum, but it isn’t open yet.

The names of everyone who died in the 9/11 attacks are engraved around the edges of the pools:

Daniel looking at the North Tower memorial.  The waterfalls were so pretty, and all the trees planted around made it such a peaceful area.  I loved how the memorial so accurately represented the huge loss of the twin towers, and was still so beautiful at the same time. 

The Survivor Tree – it was crushed and burned by the falling towers on 9/11, but workers found its stump in the rubble weeks later, and it was still alive.  They were able to nurse it back to health, and then it was replanted at the Memorial site.                          

After the 9/11 Memorial, we took the subway up to the Theatre District, where we had a reservation at a fun Mexican restaurant (Toloache – really good food, but kind of expensive and tiny portions). 

Then we walked over to the Gershwin Theatre to see Wicked.  Neither of us had seen it before – it came to Austin at the beginning of the year, but we knew we were going to New York, and I wanted to see it there.  We loved it so much!  I wasn’t surprised that I loved it, but I was surprised at how much Daniel liked it, too.  It was definitely one of my favorite things we did (I guess I had lots of favorite things). 

After the show, we walked over to Times Square and then took the subway back to our hotel. 

End of day two (when I’m looking back at this, I can’t believe we had only been in New York for two days at this point – it felt like we had already done and seen so much). 

Day Three

On Friday morning we let ourselves sleep in a little bit, and then we took the subway up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It is really, really big.  We spent almost 3 hours there, and we still didn’t see everything. 

Here are some of our favorites:

I really have a thing for colors all in order – when I saw all these color panels hanging on the wall (the picture doesn’t show all of them, so you can’t see all the cool greens), I thought it would be cool to have a super long colorful hall like that in my house someday. 

After a certain point in all of our trips, we stop pretending we’re not thinking about the kids, and we start taking pictures of all the things we know they would love to see.

Like knights in armor:

And scary masks (this is Cindy’s favorite picture of our whole trip – she asks to see it over and over again, and then she’ll shudder and say, “oooh, creepy!”  I think she just likes to say the word “creepy”):

And a real deer encased in glass bubbles (this was half crazy and half really cool):

After we were finished with the Met, we took a little walk through Central Park to get to our lunch destination, which was on the other side.

I really, really like Central Park.  We didn’t explore much our first time through (we ended up going back two more times), and I only took one picture on this walk – it was of this giant obelisk that I thought looked really cool.  It turns out that it’s even neater than I thought – I looked it up just now to see if it had a name, and I found out that it is the oldest man-made object in Central Park.  It was built in Egypt in 1500 BC, and then eventually moved to New York in 1881. 

There are crazy things like this all over in Central Park.

We ate a late lunch at one of the famous New York Shake Shacks, just on the other side of Central Park.  I thought it was a pretty cool restaurant, and their shakes were good.                                     

Then it was back on the subway, headed to the Bronx:

For our second baseball game of the trip – at Yankee Stadium!

Batting practice:

Yankee Stadium is really nice and clean and fancy, but we noticed that they are pretty strict – way before the game started they were checking everyone’s tickets and they kicked us out of the area where we were trying to catch balls if we didn’t have seats there.  Then they were saying we couldn’t even take pictures from certain areas if we didn’t have a ticket to be standing in that area.  But they did give us two free Yankee shirts which are now Rachel and Lizza’s favorite nightshirts, so that was nice of them. 

Also, the Yankees beat the Reds, so that was fun. 

There were lots of cheerful New Yorkers on the subway after the game. As a side note, one of them stomped on my foot hard while we were all standing there traveling back to Manhattan together. It hurt so bad I thought maybe it was broken.  I still have a giant bruise on my foot to remember him by. And now I can’t remember which night it was, but another time on the subway we were sitting down, and a couple got on and stood right next to us. The girl was holding onto the boy really tightly and leaning into him, and I thought maybe she was just tired or really liked him, but then it turned out that she was drunk, which we found out when she threw up all over the floor, right by my feet. I feel pretty lucky that it didn’t get all over my shoes – just one more inch and I would have been throwing my favorite shoes away.  So we felt like real New Yorkers to have all those fun subway experiences. 

Another fun experience was going to Carnegie Deli for a late dinner after the game.  Everything you order there is enormous!  I got a BLT that was so big I could have made probably 10 regular sized BLTs out of it.  There was basically a whole head of lettuce on there.  I also ordered some cottage cheese with cantaloupe, because I secretly like that kind of thing, even though I have never ordered something like that before.  I was picturing a little tiny bowl of cottage cheese, with a few pieces of cantaloupe in it, so you can imagine my surprise when they brought out a giant half of a cantaloupe, stuffed full of cottage cheese.  I know some people would think that was gross, but it was so good and I ate the whole thing.  Daniel ordered a pastrami sandwich, and it had a ridiculous amount of pastrami on it.  He said it was good, but I don’t think he’ll be eating pastrami again for a long time.

End of day three!

New York Trip: Part One

Once a year Daniel and I leave our kids behind and go on a trip with just the two of us.  It has turned into a pretty great tradition.

This is our 5th year of doing it - we have done New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.  After we got back from DC last year, we started thinking about where we wanted to go for our next one, and we decided it was about time we went to New York, since neither of us had been there.  We started planning for the trip about 5 months ago, and I should probably admit that we are crazy and intense trip planners (Daniel created an awesome spreadsheet that helped us figure out exactly what we wanted to do and when).  Anyway, we had so much fun planning this trip and thinking about it – I was surprised when the time came around to actually go. 

My mom flew into town on a Monday (the 14th) to watch the kids while we were gone, and then we left the next day, and got into New York late Tuesday night. 

We rented a car to use the next day, mostly because we wanted to be able to drive up to Hartford, Connecticut in the morning. That might seem like a strange thing to do on a New York trip, but we’re both trying to get all the states crossed off our list, and neither of us had been to Connecticut before. 

We left our hotel in Queens around 7:00 the next morning, and the drive to Hartford took about 2 hours. 

Here is the Old State House:

And me and Daniel pretending to be really wild criminals:

Hartford is a pretty city, and the weather was perfect for walking around and exploring.  We walked through downtown and up to the capitol building. 

Then it was time to head back towards New York, but this time we drove a different route so we could stop in New Haven, CT and visit Yale University.  We thought it would be fun to eat lunch there, and we had seen a Man vs. Food episode about two different popular lunch spots on campus. 

Daniel decided to try out this little restaurant called Louis Lunch.  It is tiny and cute and has the coolest little booths inside to sit at while you eat.  Also they claim to have invented the hamburger.  That is basically the only thing on their menu.  And they make a huge deal about not letting anyone put ketchup on their burger, because it is so original and special.  It is also not very good.  I didn’t try it, because the only kind of hamburger I like is a veggie burger, but this ended up being the worst meal of the trip for Daniel.

My lunch was much better.  I had decided to try out The Cheese Truck.  We had seen online that they drive around Yale campus, but are usually parked on College Street between Elm and Wall St., and that’s exactly where we found them.  I love when things are where they’re supposed to be. The people at The Cheese Truck make all kinds of fancy grilled cheese sandwiches using sourdough bread and gourmet cheeses, and then you can choose fun toppings to go inside (like avocado and bacon, if you are me).  You can tell from my face in the picture that I was excited about having such a fancy grilled cheese. It was pretty good.

We took lots of pictures while walking around Yale.  We both love college campuses.  We might have started planning for one of our children to come here someday (for graduate school, because of course they will all go to BYU for their undergraduate degrees).  I can already picture Tristan here.  We will just tell him to stay away from Louis Lunch.

                                                                                         

After our walk around Yale, we got back in the car and finished the drive back to New York, taking a minor detour through New Jersey first.  We wanted to see what Newark was like.  This building below was the only pretty thing we saw – the rest of Newark was a little scary.  I’m not sure why Daniel LaRusso in Karate Kid was so upset about moving from Newark to California.                                  

After driving through Newark, we drove down to Staten Island, and then crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge over to Brooklyn.  It was really foggy and pretty.                                                                

Our first stop in Brooklyn was at Coney Island. When I was a little girl my dad used to sing barbershop quartet songs with his brothers and one of my favorite songs they would sing was “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby”, so I was pretty excited to be able to see Coney Island in real life.  I could hear my dad’s voice singing that song in my head the whole time we were there.

Here I am on the boardwalk with my shoes off, because I can’t be this near to an ocean without running out to get my feet in the water.                                                           

Also at Coney Island is the original Nathan’s Famous hot dog place.  When we were planning for our trip I learned that not only was Nathan’s Famous featured on Seinfeld, but Mayor Giuliani declared them the best hot dogs in the world.  Also, Jackie Kennedy used to serve them in the White House, and Franklin D. Roosevelt served them to the King and Queen of England. Daniel and I shared one, and it was good. 

After Coney Island, we drove up through Brooklyn.  In this picture you can see the Brooklyn Bridge up ahead, and Manhattan off to the left.  Even though we were in a little bit of a traffic jam here, I still had a huge grin on my face, because I was so excited to just be driving down the road in Brooklyn.  I think it was around here that Daniel said, “do you know what Brooklyn is famous for?”, and I said “Spot Conlon?” (because I saw Newsies probably 20 times when I was 12 years old, and I can’t think of Brooklyn without saying “on the grounds of Brooklyn!” in Spot Conlon’s voice.  Either that, or “Never fear, Brooklyn is here!”).  But Daniel said he wasn’t thinking of Spot Conlon – he said Brooklyn is famous for sending lots of point guards to the NBA.   

We eventually made it through Brooklyn and into Queens, to our first baseball game of the trip – a Mets game at Citi Field.  We like to go to baseball games on all our trips – Daniel has a goal to go to every MLB stadium.  It’s pretty fun because they are all so different.  We usually try to get there a few hours before the game starts, so we can see batting practice and try to catch some balls.

Except if one really came anywhere near me, I would probably yell and duck. 

I think baseball fields are so pretty.  The Mets ended up losing to the Reds, but we still had a good time, and I had fun filling out the scorecard (Daniel taught me how a few years ago, and it might be my favorite part of the game – it just feels so satisfying to keep track of every play.  Also, it helps me pay attention). 

After the game we returned our rental car, got a shuttle back to the airport, and then another shuttle to our hotel.  We were tired.

And that’s it for day one.  Here’s a map of what our day looked like, in case you aren’t familiar with the New York area, and you really want to be able to picture it all in your mind.  (And I will admit that I took way too much time figuring out how to draw this, and I still didn’t get it right. And now that I look at it, I am kind of tempted to go back and color in all the water blue, and add little buildings on Manhattan and trees for Central Park.).

We’ll make it to Manhattan on Day Two.