Slice of Heaven

New York City Trip

A couple of weeks ago, Dennis and I celebrated our 12th anniversary. For the past couple of years, we have enjoyed planning a weekend trip to celebrate. This year we took the Amtrak to NYC. It was a different change of pace for us country folk, but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves! We went to see this play and were pleasantly surprised with how funny it was. We took the subway to as many places as we could stand and got around quite a bit for 2 days in the city. Below are some highlights from the weekend.

Leaving the Baltimore Penn Station at 7:00 am on Saturday. It is a beautiful, old station in the heart of Baltimore. Very easy to get to. Of course, we were there at 6:00 in the morning!

We took the regional train on the way up, and the Acela Express on the way back. This is a picture of the inside. We discovered something great about train travel compared to air travel...for a comparable price, the seats are more comfortable, walking around is easier, and the trains leave and arrive on time. Plus there is no security to go through, and you can actually arrive no earlier than 30 minutes before your train leaves and have plenty of time. Very easy. The Acela traveled very quickly...it seemed at times that we were going at least 100mph, but I don't have any evidence to back that up. But our trip time went from 2 hr 45 min on the way up on the regional, to 2 hr 10 min on the way back on Acela. Fun either way!

Typical times square photos!

We tried to do as many free things as possible, since everything costs so much in the city. So we did a lot of sightseeing on Saturday...one of the places we saw was St. Patrick's cathedral. It was a beautiful cathedral and reminded me of some of the cathedrals I remember from visiting Spain many years ago.

We went to China town for dinner Saturday night looking for some authentic Chinese food. Above is my plate...do you think it is authentic enough? Care to guess what it is? It was delicious, but only if you like squid!

Evidently something new they have done in Times Square in the summer is to close off the through streets to traffic. They have set up lawn chairs all over the place, 100's of them, and people just hang out, sitting around, looking at all of the flashing billboards and talking. It seems silly, but it was actually pretty nice and the atmosphere was not obnoxious or party-like, it was very calm. It gives all those people something to do. So we sat out at night and joined them!

On Sunday we decided to go down to the Financial district and see the World Trade center site. They have started work on the permanent memorial, which apparently they are building right on the orginal sites of the towers. From the walkway, I was able to zoom in to a piece of wall that was left standing after the collapse. It was very surreal, and gave an excellent perspective on the enormity of the 9/11 disaster. We were disappointed, however, that the temporary memorial in the old fire station was charging $10 a person to go in. I'm not sure what that's called, but it sounds to me like making money off of someone else's misfortune. Pitiful.
After the 9/11 site, we took the subway all the way down to Coney Island. It was an hour-long train ride! But for $2 a person, that's pretty cheap transportation! We got a hot-dog at Nathan's and walked down to the beach and saw the carnival rides.

All-in-all, we had a great time. Wonder what we'll do next year???