And home

We're back.  There is nothing as sublime as my own bed.  Last night, when Adam crawled into bed next to me, he asked, "How are we going to be world travelers if we like this bed so much?"

I suggested hiring strong men to follow us around with our bed on their backs.  It's a thought.

You'll have to pardon me the next several days while I record our trip for my digital scrapbook that is my blog.  It was perfect (with a few bumps along the way).  It was sentimental and beautiful and full of history and fun.

The first day:  we flew into the Newark airport.  Braeden used to love to ride the train at the Newark airport.  The whole trip, we kept telling Braeden what he used to do and what he used to love and he remembered some of it.  Emma was enamored by everything and felt like she'd returned to her ancestral home and as for Mark, he was very patient with us expounding about the days when he hadn't been born yet.

Here's their first glimpse of Manhattan:

Yeah, Emma's holding her Pooh Bear.  Her friend bought it for her on their Disneyland trip and that's as much of an explanation as I can give you.

As my dad would say, "How are you going to keep them on the farm once they've seen the lights of the big city?"

I don't love NYC.  I never have.  I also have never really given it much of a chance.  To me, it is just crowded and dingy and smelly.  And stressful.  I know lots of people love it and that's great because with that many people living there, it would be sad for them if they felt about it like I do.

We decided to take a quick drive through before heading to Connecticut. Here's a peek at the skyline as we drove in.

And then a whole lot of this happened:

Once inside the city, the chaos really hit:

Adam, who was an indispensable hero the entire time, drove us around like a champ.  We purposefully got a smaller rental car for just such experiences.  It was a wild ride.  At one point we turned down a one way street to see a green semi truck (owned by the city) barreling toward us, going the wrong way.  Adam quickly veered off the road into a tiny spot and we all breathed the shaky relief of people who had cheated death.  A few minutes later, we were nearly taken out by the same truck!  The rest of the trip we kept an eagle eye out for a green semi truck with some unexplainable grudge aimed at us.

Adam stopped to let the kids and me walk through Central Park.  He drove around to meet us on the other side.  I didn't want to walk through Central Park, I didn't want to let my kids go alone and I certainly didn't want to drive.  I decided walking through the park was the best option.

Here's a shot of the kids outside the park with the Plaza Hotel in the background:

They are, from left to right, Happy, Happy and slightly Stressed.  Because he knows how to drive, Braeden appreciated the driving, the way lane lines are suggestions and taxi drivers are straight up crazy.

Like everywhere else, the park was crowded and dingy and smelly.  (I should work for NYC tourism...)

Here's a quick picture I took while we walked.

We got as much local flavor and as many near death experiences as we could handle and then we hit the road for New England.  As a parting look, here's the Manhattan Temple: