Visiting the East Coast has been on the top of Jake's to-do list for awhile now, and I hadn't been in a few years and was up for another round. So we packed our bags, brushed up on our American History, and took the midnight plane to our first destination....
New York
We landed around 6am, dumped our bags off at the hotel, and started the sightseeing madness. First we headed to Rockefeller Center to pick up Jimmy Fallon standby tickets. Then we rented bikes and rode around Central Park. Despite the pessimistic weatherman's predictions it was a gorgeous day. And the park was amazing...definitely one of the highlights.
Those hills killed me.....it probably didn't help that I only slept for a few minutes on the plane. Or that I was way out of shape.
Waiting in line for Jimmy Fallon took up a good portion of the day....but totally worth it! He had Carmello Anthony on that day. And a couple other randoms I didn't recognize.
After the show we met up for dinner with my good friend Liz, who works for PwC in New York, and her husband Mark. It was so fun to see her and catch up.
The next day we started the craziness all over again (did I mention that Jake doesn't believe in relaxing on vacation? The goal was to pack in as many sites as humanly possible). The first stop was Lady Liberty and Ellis Island. Glad we did it but next time I think we'll skip the long line and wave to her from the free Staten Island Ferry
I got to star in a street performance (against my will). Supposedly the guy did a flip over the four of us, but we were bent over and couldn't see anything....then they asked us for money. Shouldn't we have been the ones getting paid?
This deli was featured in Man vs. Food and Jake had his heart set on trying it. So we trekked across town and Jake got his $18 pastrami sandwich.
Then we trekked across town again to a bakery that a friend had recommended and I got my $4 chocolate chip cookie. Sooooo yummy. Unfortunately the wind blew about $1.50 of it out of my hand.
Once we got the famous pastrami and cookies out of (and into, depending on how you look at it) our systems, we headed to the Museum of Natural History. As soon as we got inside they announced that it was closing in 30 minutes....and considering we had to cover the history of nature since dinosaurs, it became a race to the finish.
I think the dinosaurs won.
As if my feet weren't already about to fall off, we decided to make a mad dash to the the Met with the few minutes we had before we had to be on Broadway for the evening show.
But it was worth it because we got to cross through Central Park on the way and relive some memories from the previous day.
Not sure if you can see the guy behind Jake stretching his legs but that's a pretty good summary of how I was feeling right by the time we got there.
We saw Mary Poppins on Broadway that night. It was good, but I think Jake and I were both a bit delirious from the day's marathon around the city, so we were kindof looking forward to the end the whole time. Unfortunately for us, they tried to give everybody their money's worth and it ended up being like 3 hours long. We had a late dinner at the Shake Shack and then dragged ourselves back across town to our hotel.
The next morning we had to be in Chinatown bright and early to catch our tour bus, which would be our home for the next 5 days. We had a feeling we would be outnumbered by overzealous Chinese tourists...we just didn't realize by how much....
This is the famous Charging Bull statue on Wall Street. The competition to get a picture with it was a little too fierce for us so we settled for taking one through the window on the bus.
Overall they were great travel companions. Most were very friendly (unless you were obscuring their view of a tourist site, in which case you'd get a nice little shove).
Our always-entertaining tour guide, Jude. He wore that same purple shirt all week. And I loved the way he pronounced the states 'Pennsylwania' and 'Massatusha.'
A couple more highlights from the first day of the tour:
Brooklyn Bridge. Next time I want to walk or bike across it.
Eating lunch at High Line Park...an old railroad in the Chelsea area that was turned into a park.
We drove to Philly that night and were pleasantly surprised to be staying at the Hyatt (the tour we signed up for didn't tell us what hotels we'd be staying at so we were expecting something closer to Motel 6). We each got our own double bed to stretch out on....score.
We also had a great view of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge...and some river I can't remember the name of.
The next day we only had about 1.5 hours to explore Philly so we said what up to the Liberty Bell and took a short tour of Independence Hall.
It was nice to have a tour guide that we could finally understand.
I wish we'd had more time there....Philly seemed like a cool city.
Our next short-lived destination: DC. I think we had about 3 hours to explore here. We hit all the essentials...
Then we had about an hour for a museum. We decided to do the Museum of American History, since we had been studying up on our founding fathers in the weeks leading up to the trip (ie we watched the HBO mini-series 'John Adams' from the local library). We really enjoyed the special exhibit they had on Abe Lincoln...at least what we saw of it as we speed-walked by it (I was not allowed to stop and read anything due to our shortage of time).
Next stop: Niagara Falls....that is, after a couple random pointless stops to break up the long drive.
Hershey's Chocolate World. It was kinda fun...but I would have enjoyed it more if they had given out more free samples, and if they hadn't been such price gougers. All we came away with was an overpriced bag of chocolate licorice (which we saw at a grocery store the next day for half the price).
We also stopped at a glass museum....?
But we finally arrived at the falls.
The Maid of the Mist boat ride was definitely the highlight here....it takes you super close to the Falls and you get soaked. Luckily we had another beautiful day, since Jake refused to bring anything with long sleeves.
Our last stop with the tour bus was Boston. Harvard was cool...not sure if it was cool enough for the 5am wake-up call though....
We ditched the tour bus that afternoon, rented a car and headed up to New Hampshire to see some long lost relatives (my Uncle Brent's family, who moved back east for dental school several years ago, then decided to make it permanent). We had a great time catching up with them. We got to:
see the new Dr. Casper dentist office (Brent even took free x-rays for us; it took him awhile to figure out which was mine and which was Jake's, and we're still not sure he ever did, but we do know that one of us probably has a cavity :)),
eat lunch on the harbor,
set up the tent for the first campout of the year (Caroline and Camille were the only ones that lasted till morning)
jump on the trampoline,
roast hot dogs in the woods,
and hang out in Boston with them (there was a rainbow parade going on downtown and Brent wanted to blend in).
They had a lot going on that weekend (they closed on a new house while we were there), so we really appreciate them going out of their way to entertain us...they were fabulous hosts!
