New York City

Whew, what a busy, busy two-days we've had! I know it's hard for any of you who aren't from back East to comprehend, but in one nine hour span, we had been in five states.

We left our hotel on Thursday morning and headed to New Jersey via Annapolis. Smooth sailing until we got to the Bay Bridge that takes you across the Chesapeake Bay. Traffic was backed up and it took us 40 minutes to get through the toll booth. We thought traffic would take off once we passed that point but, NOT. The traffic was all being channeled into two lanes to go across the bridge. Becky was driving and as we were merging, she saw a state trooper coming up behind and stopped (no one else was) and waited for him so he could merge in front of us. Amazingly, no one honked or raised their middle finger at us. Anyway, once he got in front of us and he made his way up to the front of the line, they opened up a lane on the other side of the bridge and he motioned for us to follow him. He led us and all the rest of those behind us across at about 60 mpg (speed limit on bridge is 45 mph). Meanwhile, all of those that wouldn't let him in or had cut in front of us, were on the other side of the bridge creeping along. See, it does pay to be nice!!!

From there it was smooth sailing. We proceeded up and went through Philadelphia, man I didn't know there were so many bridges in Philly. We passed Trenton and went on to Princeton where we were going to spend the night. Once we checked into our hotel we headed for NYC.

OMG - what an adventure that was. We took a train to the city (a 70 minute ride). We were hoping to make a 4:30 boat trip at Pier 93. We got off the train at Penn Station then took a cab (not as much of an adventure as I expected it to be) to the Pier, but just missed the boat. So we caught a bus up to Times Square and bought tickets for a double-decker bus tour. We took the tour called the Downtown Loop. It took us through/past the following areas: Greenwich Village, Times Square, Empire State Building, Union Square shopping district, Soho, Chinatown, Little Italy, East Village, Rockefeller Center, Central Park and many, many more areas. It was totally worth the price.

After the tour we took the subway to Penn Station then caught the train back to Princeton, getting back around 11:15.

So, we experienced a NYC cab ride, train, subway, bus and tour bus!!

Friday morning (we keep having to ask each other what day it is) we caught the train back to NYC as we had bought tickets the day before for the 12:30 cruise around the island of Manhattan.

Let me just say, today was much less stressful as we knew which subway to take, which bus we needed and which train track we needed to go to to get home.

We made it to Pier 93 with about an hour to spare and waited for our "cruise" to load. The three hour tour was fascinating. I had no idea there was so much wooded areas of Manhattan. The highlight of the tour for me was seeing the Statue of Liberty.

Off to Boston tomorrow. I've been having trouble uploading pictures so Megan can add them to the slide show. I'll keep trying.

Later!!!