New York City in a Day!

Okay so only about a week late, here is the last piece of our New York adventure, bear in mind I typed this on my little word processor as we drove thru New Jersey and into Pennsylvannia...and the rain that I mention, well, they ended up closing the interstate at some point after we passed through the area because of flooding. Anyway- here's my last little blip:

Well it is Sunday around noon, not sure what day I left off with…had to look twice to see what day it is today! Yesterday was so incredibly busy and we are all worn out, walking around in a daze. We started out by getting up late J and having a decent free breakfast. Then we hopped into two cars and headed to the train station and took us an hour long train ride into New York city. What I have found on this trip is that people up north have a skewed sense of time. We were told the train ride was about a 30-45 ride. Not so…
Anyhow, we emerged from the underground Pennsylvannia station at 33rd and 8th street. Was quite a site, saw our first homeless man, getting naked in a corner changing his clothes. I immediately reached out to touch my babies, get them under my wing.
We sent some pics home via cell phones of our first view of New York. The kids faces were priceless. We found us a street vendor and grabbed a hot dog. We bought some tour bus tickets, one of those hop on hop off deals. First stop was at the Empire State building, we had tourist written all over us because we had no less than 20 people approach us selling tours…

Time out for a weather update- we know we are traveling becaseu once again it is raining, like pouring it out oof a boot…roads are flooded and everything. Also, let m epause to note that their cell towers are designed to look like giant trees. Towering WAY above the rest of the trees. With weird looking branches that point straight up. Odd.

Ok where were we? Um oh yea New York- we did the city in about 12 hours. We saw the Empire state building, Chinatown, where we were the only white people, and saw a couple of dudes gtting worked up about “corner infringement”. We had real New York pizza, we saw Ground Zero, the Statue, although we missed out on the Ferry… We saw Little Italy, Wall Street, Broadway, Central Park, Times Square, and then! we did it at night! And we took a ride into Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge at night. Was awesome. Overall the tour was well worth the money, although I had not really budgeted the money for it, I’m glad we splurged. There was no way we could’ve seen all we did in 12 hours. We did get a little lost trying to find our way to the train station, probably because I was asking for directions to the bus station J hehe, Well I was tired what can I say? People felt sorry for the poor southern girl though… and we met a really nice couple who had just come from a Casting Crowns concert and were super great helping us get straight.
So we made it to the train station and tried to ask an attendant which track to go to… what we learned as we were boarding the train was that the attendants don’t know what they are talking about… good thing I asked the conductor “Does this train go to New Brunswick station” He says “no, that’s the Trenton train and the last one out leaves in a few minutes.” WHAT!!
So we jumped off the train, went running nuts through the station, trying to find our way back, because of course we were at the down escalators and we needed to go up…we burst through a doorway into an endless hall and started making a run for it, not sure where we were going…then Bart, bless him, happened on a screen that said Track 11 was where we needed to be, and we whirled around a couple of times and “AAAHH” (that’s the sound of angels singing) Trenton train- Track 11 and we flew through the door, down the corridor and burst onto the platform, and the train was there ready to load at 12:34 a.m. We had 8 minutes to spare. Whew…so an hour train ride later and we were navigating those aggravating one way streets, making a dozen right hand turns to make one left turn, and got ourselves back onto familiar ground. We were all very happy to see our hotel, where we passed out with one foot on the floor