New York, Day 5

Wow, I'm beat tonight. All this tourist stuff is doing me in. I'll feel like a new person after 8 hours of sleep.

Today, I thought we'd have time for more, but didn't want to rush through anything. We got in 911 Memorial and Museum, Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I was thinking we'd be done with all that by 2ish. It was more like 6:00, and we could've easily stayed at Ellis Island longer but they were closing. Here's our day...

We got to the 911 Memorial and they are building 7 buildings for the 7 that went down.  This is building 5 I think, which is going to be the Metro building.  It's made out of all recycled material from the Twin Towers.  It looked pretty cool.

Here's the Memorial with Freedom Tower in the background.

Here's one of the original walls from the South tower.  The actually built the new museum around it.

All 11 men from ladder 3, died trying to save people that day.

This is called the Survivor tree.  It's the only tree in the area that survived.

Then, we saw Ben's future school.  New York Film Institute.  

We headed out to the Statue of Liberty.  

Suzy found a little poodle, like her Katie.  :)

Then, we went to Ellis Island.  They were closing in an hour, but we still watched a great movie about it and got to walk around some.  This was Registration Hall.

And here are some relatives names etched in the wall.  Peter and Angelina was my Dad's grandparents.  So, my kids' great, great grandparents.  Pretty darn cool.

This is my Dad's Mom side of the family.  It ran into several columns.

There were way more than this, over 11 million  more.  But, they only did the ones that paid to have it done years ago.  I think it's pretty neat.  Emily was sitting on the rail.  I'm sure her great, great, grandmother would've thought it neat that one day, 5 generations down that her granddaughter would be chillaxin' on the rails.

Ellis Island closed in 1954.  My Dad came over in 1955.  

Here's some more of the skyline on the way back in the golden light.

Ellis Island.

Tomorrow, we are headed to the Top of the Rock!  That's Rockefeller Center at night.  

This is Carnegie Hall.  They actually put tents up with red carpet in them and the limo's pull right in, so the celebrities can get out without being seen by anybody on the streets.  Must be nice!

We eat hot dogs at 9:00 for dinner.  :)

Well, the kids eat hot dogs. David and I split a gozleme.  It's Turkish food and was sooo good.  Chicken, spinach, mozzarella, beans, etc, wrapped in the lightest tortilla.  

Ok, time for bed.  I'm beat!

New York, Day 4

Another great day in NYC!!!!

We got a three day hop on hop off bus package for super cheap. It was nice to be able to sit back, take in the sites and not worry about the kids crossing the streets. Today we headed to Uptown.

The kids loved the double decker bus.


It was nice to have it narrated too, so you get a little history.  This was right where John Lennon was shot and killed.

We got off at the Museum of Natural History.  The kids loved the dinosaurs.

The lions were totally awesome!  

Ben acting afraid of the dinosaurs.

Emily and a mammoth.

Em loved this manatee skeleton.  It was super cute with tiny little hands/flins.

Here's Emily and Noah being sweet and going through the museum together.  I can tell exactly how hungry and tired my kids are by the way these two act.  They are sweet and loving, all is well.  For now.

Doesn't this look like a poster?  It was the cutest monkey ever!

Here's  Noah with people his size.

There was a whole display of owls.  Em loved it!

Ok, we are now in the Mexican people exhibit and the kids are getting tired.

At some point, I had to separate Emily and Noah.  I mean, really, a time out in the middle of the museum.  The hunger/tiredness is setting in.

We finished up at the museum and head to Central Park.  We didn't do everything we wanted to do in Central Park as we are coming back on Thursday.  But, it was super pretty.

We got hot dogs and pretzels at Central Park.  See that?  It's called smiles.

Now, that we rested and their bellies were full, we headed off to The Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  I've been to New York several times and we always go to St. Patrick's Cathedral, so it was nice to see something different.  It was amazing.

See, they are getting along again.  Nothing a hot dog can't fix.

The stained glass was so, so pretty.

To Noah, this was like the coolest playground ever.  I had to scold him a few times that this wasn't a jungle gym.  It is a holy place.

At the next area, he got holy.

Is that not beautiful?

I showed the kids that the pad is to kneel down and pray, so they all said a little prayer.  

Then, we hopped back on the bus for more of the Uptown tour.

Here's the Apollo theater.

We all loved the tours.  It was nice to see everything and just kick back instead of walking everywhere.

We got off at Rockefeller center.  

This is after the kids noticed the HUGE Lego store next door.

We were going to do the Top of the Rock where you head up to skyscraper, but at 4:00, they were giving out tickets for 6:50.  We didn't want another night time high rise.  We wanted to do it in the day as it's a totally different experience than what we had last night at The Empire State Building.  So, we decided to save it for Thursday.  

We grabbed dinner instead.  Noah got the salad bar.  By salad bar, I mean chicken a few carrots and no salad.

Instead, we hoped on the night time tour that took us to Brooklyn and back.  New York is one experience by day and another by night.  

It still looks pretty light here, but it was seriously almost dark.

Noah quickly lost interest.  Poor guy had a long day.

We were headed over the Manhattan Bridge and the view was awesome.  But, the thing was bumping so bad that I couldn't get a clear picture.  But, trust me, it was spectacular.

The driver stopped in Brooklyn, so I was able to get a few more shots.  That tall building with the pink antennae is the Freedom Tower (World Trade Center).

I tried to get another shot going back over the bridge, but still blurry.  That's the Brooklyn Bridge in the front.

We ended the night finding the best little bakery ever.  It's two doors down from our hotel, so probably not good that we found it with two days left!  We ate everything else and this is what we were too full to eat.

Tomorrow is the Statue of Liberty and stuff in Downtown!