Wednesday, August 11, 2010

NYC Day 2

Our second day in NYC started about 7am. Here we are in the lobby of Kathryn and Mark's apartment building (notice the retainer in my hand). We were off to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We were happy we went early because we didn't have to wait in line at all!

This is one of my favorite pictures of the entire trip. It was a beautiful (HOT) day!


Lady Liberty. Did you know the Statue of Liberty is made out of copper and is about two pennies thick all the way around? I didn't either, thanks Mark for that bit of info!



Posing with a segal at Ellis Island.

We didn't stay too long on Ellis Island but we did a search of our ancestors and we both found some!

On our way back to the city!

Next we headed up to Ground Zero. It didn't look like much, just a construction zone. But it was neat to be there.



Then we made our way up to Wall Street to the New York Stock Exchange.




And visited George Washington!


Hello, George!


We then noticed this really big and cool looking church across the street. I believe it is the Holy Trinity Church.


We decided to go inside (all the other tourists were, so we figured, why not?), and found out it is an Episcopal church, and used in the National Treasure movies!


Oh, and here's the bull. You can't visit Wall Street without seeing the bull.


Then Mark and I took the subway into Brooklyn, so we could walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.


The view from the Brooklyn Bridge!


Then we walked up to China town, but on our way Mark saw this sign. It sayes, "Avenue of the Strongest." Mark got a kick out of it. Therefore, we took a picture! :)


China town was....interesting. Smelly....but really fun to experience. We ended up getting cheap T-shirts and some souvenirs for our kids.


This is one of the reasons China Town is so smelly!



When Mark and I were deciding to visit NYC and thinking about what we wanted to do there, just about the only thing Mark wanted to do was to have a corned beef sandwich at Carnegie Deli. A few months ago we were watching Man vs. Food on the Discovery channel and one of the challenges for the host was to eat this massive corned beef sandwich at Carnegie Deli in NYC. I'm so sad we didn't take a picture, but yes we ate this sandwich (we had to split it, it was so big) and it was very delicious!!


We then walked up to Columbus Circle....


...over to the temple. I actually thought it was a very pretty building. We went up to the 3rd floor where they hold Sunday services. We weren't planning on doing a session, but since we were there, we didn't have children with us, and it is a great thing to do, we decided that Saturday would be a good day to do a session in the Manhattan Temple!


Then we took the subway up to 86th street and walked through Central Park.


Mark and I really liked the brown stone buildings that were close to Mark and Kathryn's apartment (Mark especially liked this tree!).


But our day wasn't over yet! We had tickets to see Wicked on Broadway!! Can I just say...BRAVO!! This was another highlight for me. I loved it!! Mark did as well. It made it more fun that neither of us knew the complete story. We knew a few of the main songs, but not the story. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

NYC Day 1

Last week Mark and I (without our children) had the amazing opportunity to visit my sister, her new born little girl and my brother in-law in NYC! We also got to visit many of the historic and tourist attractions New York has to offer. We left on an 8am flight and arrived just after 3:00pm EST. The car ride from the airport to the Upper West side of Manhattan was my first taste of the fast paced, rushed life style of NYC. Wow, do they ever drive fast and aggressive! I understand why Kathryn and Mark don't own a car! The streets are crazy busy with pedestrians everywhere. Mark took this one picture from the car as we were crossing the bridge into Manhattan (random, but he liked the bridge). It was so fun to meet my adorable little niece, Ila, and to spend some time with my sister Kathryn. The first thing we did was go for a walk through Central Park. I LOVE Central Park. So much in fact, we visited it 4 times during our 4 day vacation.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Swimming is fun!








So many swimming posts, but it is summer. Last weekend we had our nieces baptism, then we had a nice dinner and the kids went swimming! Our kids had a blast. Caleb was an animal. He went down the slide about 30 times. James and Andrew are great swimmers and had so much fun. It is so great to see them enjoy the water so much.




And our basement is finished! Here's a picture, but it looks so much prettier in real life.

Friday, July 30, 2010