New York Recap: Friday

On Friday, January 16th, we dropped Amelie off at school, Violet and Linus off with my parents, and we were on our way to NYC by about 9:30am. We made it to Liberty State Park(in NJ) just in time to watch the 1:00 ferry leave for Ellis Island. That meant we had an hour to look around the old train station and to check out the view of the Manhattan skyline, as shown behind Duncan. You can't see it, but just above Duncan's left shoulder is where the plane that landed in the Hudson the day before was docked.

We took the Ferry to Ellis Island and looked up my relatives. Sten and Mathilda are my maternal grandmother's parents.

Henning and Hildur are my maternal grandfather's parents. In other words, these are both of my mom's sets of grandparents that came through Ellis Island from Sweden. Pretty cool to see their names there.

Here's a cool view of the Statue of Liberty from Ellis Island.

Much of Ellis Island remains unrestored. Here was a cool section of one of those buildings.

After we toured around a bit (we could have stayed for hours), we hopped back on the ferry to Liberty Island. Fortunately, there was a very detailed sailing schedule on the boat, to avoid any confusion.

Here's a view of Ellis Island from Liberty Island. The building with the four domes on top is the one that is restored and contains the museum exhibits.

At this point, you can't even get into the base of the statue without making reservations and getting tickets at least a week in advance. Therefore, we just got to walk around the island. It was freezing, but we only had an hour before the last ferry left to take us back to Liberty State Park.

We arrived back at our car close to 6:00 and had to fight our way through the Holland Tunnel and into the city. It wasn't so bad and pretty soon we'd arrived at our hotel. We got settled quickly and headed out to a nearby Italian restaurant for a yummy dinner. They we set off to find some of the close by landmarks!

We found Rockefellar Center and Radio City Music Hall.

Then we walked to Times Square and hit the Toys R Us. We even took a ride on their indoor Ferris wheel!

We got to choose between the Barbie car or the My Little Pony car. Duncan wasn't thrilled with either.

But he made the best of the situation, making nice with his pony.

Here's a self portrait in Times Square. We sent this picture to the kids as an e-mail postcard.

When at Rockefeller Center, we hit up the Magnolia Bakery for some of their yummy cupcakes. Here I am, hat hair and all, getting ready to enjoy some yummy goodness.

Please excuse all of the nitty gritty details. I'm recording this as much for me as for anyone else.

Next up will be the adventures of Saturday.