Ben had a board review coarse in New Jersey (for his final set of boards which he will take in August) - we decided it would be too fun to pass up me coming along, since it's just a short train ride away from New York City. My mom and dad were saints to take all of our kids for the week so that we could go play together. We've never left our kids for this long a period of time before, but I wasn't nervous at all to leave them - I knew they would be in great hands and I knew the kids would LOVE spending that time with their grandparents. I'll do another post later about what the kids did while we were away.
When Ben was done with his classes in the morning, we hopped on the NJ Transit train for the 30ish minute ride to Penn Station in New York City. We rode this train back and forth each day so we could play...
The first order of business: The Metropolitan Museum of Art! ...well, actually, the first order of business was figuring how to get to the museum from the train station. It was difficult to really get some good information from the tourist desks - we ended up taking a bus, which was a dumb idea - we quickly learned that buses are probably the slowest way to travel around Manhattan - from that point on, we got really good at reading our Subway maps.... underground is the way to go! Btw, this was my first time ever in New York City - Ben had been once before when he was younger, but overall, we were newbies in a new big city...
I quickly realized that I couldn't as easily hide behind the camera with my kids taking the spotlight... I felt awkward being in front of the camera all the time, with just Ben and I...
But I made Ben take turns too! :)
The Egyptian rooms were awesome. Someday I long to go to Egypt! But this was definitely the next best thing :)
Mummy wrappings!
A real mummy! Wow!
Ben was so in awe of this machete/pistol from the 1500's...
The artwork was amazing - I was especially excited to see real Monet's and Van Gogh's!
This Self Portrait of Van Gogh was so much smaller than I thought it would be...
We stayed at the Met till closing - since we were right on the edge of Central Park, we were anxious to explore it a bit - I'm glad we were wearing good walking shoes!
I was just in awe of how green and beautiful Central Park is - and it's just so huge!
Strawberry Fields...
After Central Park, I wanted to make a quick visit to see Times Square at night before catching our train back to the hotel - we definitely weren't going to take a bus again, so I got to ride a subway for the first time! I was so excited...
Yay Times Square! I felt like I had really made it to New York City by getting to this spot...
Next in the lineup: the Empire State Building and Broadway!
Couples need time to re-charge. It's great that you had some time together.
ReplyDeleteThat museum looked good.