New York Day 2

On the 2nd day, we woke up early, got ready and were out the door by 9:00 am. We found a deli that became "our" deli. The kids loved it so we went there every morning for breakfast. We all got bagels and I got coffee and sometimes a yogurt. After that, we headed to The Empire State Building. There was already a pretty long line to get in, but Wayne got us a City Pass. You pay a flat fee and are able to do about 20 different attractions plus it acts like a Fast Pass, you get to skip all of the regular lines. So we got right in. We found out that Nathan is a little scared of heights. We was totally fine at the top where you can look out from the inside, but once we went higher and went outside, he got a little panicky. He had to hold onto something the whole time and didn't really want to get too close to the railing. Next we headed to China Town and Little Italy. Let me remind you that we WALKED everywhere!!! Wayne got an insane amount of steps in! China Town was really interesting. There were stores with all sorts of weird meats hanging down and lots of little shops. We decided to eat lunch there since we were going to have Italian the next night for dinner. All of the restaurants have a sanitary grading card in their windows so we made sure to find one that had an A, and then I googled restaurants in China Town to find one that had good tourist ratings. The one we decided on was so cute and authentic looking and the food was great! Even Charlotte, who is the pickiest eater in the world, ate the sesame seed chicken!!! I knew she might eat the noodles, but the only chicken she likes to eat is chicken nuggets. I just about died when she tried mine and Wayne's and asked for a plate of her own! After lunch, we went to Wall Street. It started to rain, but we were prepared with rain coats and umbrellas. We completely lucked out on the weather! This was the only day it rained, and it only rained for a couple of hours. It didn't slow us down one bit. In fact, Nathan and Charlotte thought it was fun! After Wall Street was the Statue of Liberty tour. We got on a ferry that took us around it. The kids loved that. Plus it was nice to have a break and sit and relax for a while. Then we went to the 9-11 memorial. I think this was one of the most interesting things for me to see. Nathan and Charlotte have heard about 9-11 but being at the memorial put it all into perspective for them and us too. It was so sad to see the fire department that was right there and see a plaque that had all of the fire fighters names and pictures who had died. Then to see the the memorial of the twin towers was amazing. There were two memorials where each of the twin towers stood. They were huge hollowed out squares that had names engraved all around them of the people who died and the inside was really deep with a fountain flowing. It was really beautiful but really sad. The new building is One World Trade Center. There is an observatory here that we went to. This was cool because you could pay to get an IPad to use as a virtual helicopter tour. Once you go up to the top of the tower, there is a huge observatory where you can see all around the city. You point the IPad where are looking out and the IPad shows you different icons of what you are looking at. Tap on one of them, and it virtually flies you there and tells you all about it. Wayne got one for both Nathan and Charlotte and they LOVED learning all about the different landmarks. They guy that was checking them out gave wayne and extra one for free which I thought was nice :) A really cool thing here was that while we were looking out, a thunderstorm rolled in. We were so high, that we could see it coming! Nathan freaked out a little but not too bad :) It was like this huge wall of clouds movie towards us and you could see the lightning and rain. It was really neat!!! We were pretty tired by this point so we found a cute deli to sit down in and have dinner. Nathan pretty much ordered cheeseburgers or sliders at every meal. Charlotte lived off of pizza, bagels, and pretzels (which the pizza in New York is amazing so she was happy there!)