Trip to New York

At the end of April I took a trip with Christian and David to visit my sister, Marcia.  She and her family lived in Jersey City, New Jersey in an apartment right on the water with a GORGEOUS view of New York City.  The weather was a little cooler than I was expecting and so I had to borrow jackets for everyone, and the wet weather also prevented us from doing some of the things we had wanted, but regardless, we had a great time.

On Friday we went to see the 9/11 Memorial. 

The World Trade Center is big and they are making good progress.

The memorial is beautiful.  There are 2 LARGE waterfalls that occupy the footprint of the twin towers.  In the center the water disappears and you can’t see where the water goes, there is no bottom.  It’s beautiful. 

Around the edges are the names of the people who were killed in the terrorist attacks and there are kiosks where you can look up the location of individual people.  There was also 1 tree from the site which survived the attack.  It was re-planted somewhere else and nursed back to health, then re-planted again on the memorial site.  It is aptly named “The Survivor Tree.”  It was very sobering and beautiful.

We then walked (it was A LOT of walking) to a playground at the South Street Seaport and let the kids out of the strollers to play for a while until John got off work. 

The next day we walked all around NYC.  And I mean, ALL AROUND!  We saw Times Square, the LDS Temple, Radio City Music Hall, and so on and so on. 

We ended up in Sheep’s Meadow of Central Park where we ate some yummy cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and the kids played for a while. 

It really wasn’t that cold, he just wanted to wear the hat and gloves because…well, because he could.  This kid loves to accessorize!  We also rode the carousel in Central Park then went back to New Jersey to have some New York pizza.  It was yummy!

On Sunday we ended up just driving around a little.  We saw the back of the Statue of Liberty, and we were going to let the kids play at a park, but we ended up with 4 sleeping kids, so we didn’t stop.

I had a GREAT time visiting my sister and her husband and I’m glad I got to see where she lived.  I say “lived” because she just moved this week back to the Salt Lake City area. I look forward to visiting her again when we go to Utah at Christmas time.