NYC (WAAAYYYYY TOO MANY PICTURES!!!!! but we did a lot, and took a ton of pic's!

How could I possibly choose only a few?

This time I am going to get to the NYC pictures!!!! I took a lot of pic's while I was away for two weeks! you've only seen a very SMALL portion of them!

When we were driving north out of the city to head to the Farm, Sariah got a glimpse of the George Washington Bridge, and really wanted to go over "The Big Bridge"! I told her we'd go over it on our way back to the City on Friday. Knowing what I know now... I might have gone a different way, but live and learn.

First of all we didn't leave as early as originally planned, since we decided we'd be in work traffic if we tried to leave before 8 am. My goal was between 8-9 (closer to 9). I got up early, told 'L' goodbye, and ended up back in bed for an hour... serves me right! We didn't make it out of the house till around 10 am! UGH!!! and even with that the traffic at the bridge was quite a lot at 10:30 when we got down there. It was stop and go all the way onto the brigde and all the way across. AND... the toll has gone up significantly from 20 (plus) years ago. I was prepared to pay a toll but did NOT expect it to be $8.00!!! I don't know who can afford to go across that bridge very often! Good Grief!

Anyway, Sariah was snapping away taking pic's as we went across to Manhattan. We drove over to Rach's area to park so we could be there for the night and then to be ready to leave Sat. for home. We got an excellent parking spot just up the street from Rach's building and it was free! yippeee!!!! We stopped in and saw the babies (sleeping in their bassinet - Rach was sleeping), saw grandma and 'T' and then headed out to see the sights.

On our way we walked past 'A's school. They are refurbishing the building so it has scaffolding all around it, and they don't have a playground currently, so... they block off the whole street in front of the school durring the day, and the kids run, jump rope, play chalk, etc in the street. As we walked by we happend to see 'A' she was sitting on the sidewalk by the fence (scaffolding fence), I think they were about to line up to go in...

We took the subway from Rach's down to Grand Central Station, then switched to another subway train to get down town toward Ground Zero. The one is of a large banner hainging on one of the nearby buildings, with a picture of what the area will look like when they are done with the reconstruction/rebuilding. Sariah was shocked that anyone would put up tall sky scrapers again... I tried to explain that the idea was to not let 'Fear' and Terrorism win! That we can't be scared and afraid constantly we have to go on living our lives. On this note however, I don't know if they just do not have much in the way of memorial at the moment, or if they don't on purpose, or if I just couldn't find it (I asked for directions to be able to see stuff), but I was somewhat surpirsed there was not more to see. There were dried flowers hanging in the chain link fence around it. Of course 9-11 was just a month before.

At this point we are inside one of the World Trade Center Buildings (the World Financial Center). There is a bridge across the road, and then in this building there is a big windo wall where you can look down in to Ground Zero, and see them working to rebuild.

This one with the yellow scaffolding stuff is actually a wall that will be hydraulically lifted up or something like that and it will go up about 6 flights or perhaps even higher. I don't remember - there was a construction worker inside at the time we were there, telling a school group (his kids were in it), about the rebuilding efforts. In the Financial Building we found a nice little food court and had a yummy lunch on fresh cooked flat bread from Cosi Sandwhich Bar. http://www.getcosi.com/folders.asp?action=display&record=32 Yummy.

I am going to save more pic's and more sight seeing for my next post. There is just so much more to show and tell about.