New York, NEW YORK!

So I have this friend Braden. He's one of the people who went with me to Gettysburg. He and my roommate Jess became good friends and they were supposed to go to New York sometime before Jess left for California, however that never worked out. So...Braden and I went. We tried to get some other people to come with us, but that just didn't work out. Despite that I had an amazing time...sleep deprived, but a fantastic time.

We bought tickets for the 2:30am Chinatown bus, but it turns out that they don't have a 2:30am but, but a 3:30 am bus, so we spent about 45 minutes wandering around 6th and I Street NW DC at 2 in the morning waiting for the bus. We weren't the only luckily ones. The exciting adventure of that part of the trip was our new friend the rat...a huge, gigantic rat. We tried to get a picture, but turns out he's a little camera shy and once we took out our camera he refused to show himself clearly.

Once we were on the bus I thought...yay, now we can settle down and sleep for the next 5 hours or so, but no...first it was cold, but the most interesting part was that the bus driver kept stopping every so often on the side of the road and get out walk around and get back in...what was going on I don't know, but we did eventually make it to New York.

The bus drops you off in Chinatown New York and we just kind of followed the crowd until we ended up at subway stop. Thanks to my and Jess' wandering in Europe via train and subway/metro I'm every familiar with getting use to new cities and figuring out the public transportation. I'm not shy about asking for directions. We made our way up to Time Square and one of the first things I did was buy a map. I've learned the hard way the value of a detailed map when wandering on foot in a new city.

This was one of my favorite signs in Time Square...so get out and VOTE People!

We spent quiet a bit of time trying to decide if we wanted to go to a Broadway show, but after standing in line and seeing the prices and the times we decided that we wanted to spend more time actually seeing the city then watching a show. That will have to happen some other trip to New York. So we wandered. We went up to Rockefeller Square and then hopped on the subway back down the Battery Park to take a ferry out to Ellis and Liberty Island. We waiting in line for about 2 hours, but when all was said and done it was worth it. You can spend an entire day just at Ellis Island.

Us in line for two hours...good thing we're good at entertaining ourselves.

On the ferry

I had family come through Ellis Island and it was interesting to see a little of what they might have experienced

After the Islands we started our way toward Uptown, walking of course, so we could see more. We ended up at the World Trade Center site and then on to Wall St.

And for those who like the National Treasure movie we went to the corner of Wall and Broadway and saw the Trinity Church.

(yeah I'm a dorky history loving girl).

Having satisfied our curiosity for downtown and just about done walking we jumped on the subway once again and took it up to the temple. It was closed, but it was fun to see it. A random building in the middle of Manhattan. We then went to Central Park. I was definitely done walking by that time and sat down for a while, while Braden wandered around. We then found a pizza place, for New York pizza. Then we started on our way back. Our plan was to stop by the Empire State Building, but as we walked down Broadway, near Times Square, now in full night time activity we realized that we weren't making good enough time to make it to see the Empire State Building and back to our bus in time. The place was packed full of people! So we found our way to the closest subway and went back to Chinatown. We made it with about 15 minutes to spare.

The ride home was just as interesting...our bus driver got cut off and had to slam on the breaks and the van in front of us started fish tailing and it looked like an accident was inevitable. But the van righted itself and we moved on. We made it back to DC by 2 am and home by 3:30 am. The metro was still running and we managed to make the last train home. I was so exhausted. I slept until about 11 am. We had a very busy 24 hours!

Good Times!