New York, New York

The final stop on my family’s 2024 I-95 road trip was New York. I’m hoping in the future we can go all the way up to Maine in the north, and south from DC to Miami. We stayed in a hotel in Queens, which was definitely interesting. We would usually Uber to the subway station and then headed to wherever we wanted to go. I wanted the kids to get some experience getting around New York, and by the end they were able to read the subway maps and get us home from wherever we were, which was really cool to see. We fit a lot of exploring in, including the Empire State Building, Aladdin on Broadway, the Met, the American Museum of Natural History, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. The favorite thing for both kids was finding a restaurant they liked near Times Square (which we had to go to for lunch every day), and a light-up neon bike rickshaw ride we took from the Empire State Building to the New Amsterdam Theater, which cost a ridiculous amount of money, but got us to our Broadway play in time, and the kids were so happy it was worth every penny, Olivia even screamed “This is the best day of my life” at the top of her lungs.

The day we decided go to the Statue of Liberty was pretty windy, but it was a lot of fun. We took the ferry out to Liberty Island, unfortunately we couldn’t go all the way up to the crown, but still went to the top of the pedestal. We also went to Ellis Island which was really interesting. I thought it was important to show the kids what a lot of Americans saw when they first came to this country, especially after seeing many of the places where this country was created in the late 1700s it was important to see where many people became Americans in the late 1800s and early-mid 1900s.

One of the funnest parts of the trip was that the kids had just seen the “Night at the Museum” movies, we had done it a bit backwards though, we went to the Smithsonian Museums first when we were in DC, and then Natural History in New York, where the first movie took place. There were a bunch of stuff that was in the movie that wasn’t exactly how it was in the movie, which is to be expected, but we did get to see the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Moai statue, we found the T-Rex fossil, and a Teddy Roosevelt statue. We also went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and got to see a ton of really cool artistic and historic pieces. I was hoping to see “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Hokusai, which I had thought about when I was making a visor from a trip I did so find WWII Japanese shipwrecks off of Attu Island earlier in the year, but it wasn’t on display at the time. We did get to see a bunch of Monet and Van Gogh paintings, a lot of weapons and armor from different places and times (samurai, medieval Europe, age of exploration, etc.), a Stradivarius violing, and the oldest surviving piano from the Cristofori workshop in the world.

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I-95 Philadelphia