Leaving New York City

Finally the kids and I walked around the financial district (Wall St.)  Then meet up with a friend, we gave him a quick hug before jumping in a cab and heading to the airport to grab dinner a catch our 8:00 flight back home.  We got back to Florida around 10:30 with 2 tired kids that had to go to school on Tuesday.

After seeing Liberty Island we took the quick trip over to Ellis Island.  We did not stay long as we need to get back to the main land.  We did walk inside and see a few of the rooms.

After the ferry landed on Liberty Island, the kids and I went straight back to the line to go inside the statue.  You can not go up inside the actual statue now days, but you can go to the base.  This takes some time as the security is very tight.  They only give out so many tickets a day and then you have to go through these machines that are x-rays and blow on you.  The kids were able to go through together and my machine blew my shirt up (interesting).  But, once it was over we were inside the museum as long as we liked, to read about everything.  The ranger stopped us at the door and asked the kids to fill out a booklet to be junior rangers so we had to read every sign to answer all the questions (they got plastic b

adges at the info center at the end).  Since we were visiting on a Monday and school had already started, I would say it was not very crowded.  Most visitors spoke a foreign language (a lot of German was spoken around us).  The weather was beautiful while we were there, too.  We probably send 2.5 hours on Liberty Island.

The first thing we did in Battery park was the geocache Mib, then we toured Castle Clinton. Our tickets to Liberty Island were for 11:15 and from the Jersey side.  We were able to jump on a ferry by 10:00 and no body paid any attention to the time or place on our tickets.  We did have to go through air port type security to get on the ferry.

Monday morning we got up pretty early, John had to be down on Wall St. for his class, so the kids and I rode the subway down with him.  We came out across from where the World Trade Center used to be.  John left us to go to class, so the kids and I headed south.  We found a great deli called Champs and had bagels, donuts, oj and I had a cranberry scone for around $12 (not bad for the financial district).  The kids and I finally ended up in Battery Park.

Whirlwind trip to NY City

After dinner we walked down Broadway to Times Square.  We went in a huge Toys 'R Us store that had a ferris wheel inside. We also went in the ESPN zone and played a few games.  Afterwards we headed back to the room for bed.

After meeting up with our friend we walk to Central Park.  I had loaded a bunch of Geocaches into my GPS.  The problem with Geocaching in NY City is reception is spotty and on a beautiful Sunday Central Park is very crowded.  We started for the first cache and ran into another group caching, unfortunately the spot we tried looking 2 or 3 times had a couple making out on the bench.  We walked over to Umpire Rock and did a new Earth Cache and then wandered around the park for a little while longer.  Finally we were starting to get hunger, so I used my GPS to look up a restaurant.

After the Empire State Building we wandered down Broadway trying to get back to our hotel, except most of the street were block off for some concert. We finally found a small NY style pizza place and had lunch. After lunch went went back to the the hotel and checked into our room and met up with one of our friends.

After reaching the top the kids and I took tons of picture of the buildings down below:

Our room was not ready at 9:30 so we took off across NY to see the sites. I had pre-bought ticket to the Empire State building (Clay's #1 pick of things to do). So we headed out to see it.

Well after 2 years of begging we finally took the kids to New York City with us. We had soccer games late on Saturday afternoon, so we did not leave until early Sunday. When I mean early we had to get everyone up at 3:30 am to catch our 6:15 flight. We flew Jetblue direct to Kennedy. Jetblue was an awesome plane with TV's in the back of all our seats. There were only about 30 of us on the whole flight and when we landed they asked us to remain seated with our seat-belts on and when they opened the doors 6 or 7 police officers got on and went straight to the back of the plane. They took this man off the plane and handcuffed him. We never did find out what he did, but he went peacefully-they asked the stewardess if there were any witnesses and she said just her. Sage requested to take the subway in to town. What was nice was the station came out right next to our hotel.