New blog & Circle Line cruise

My old blog site wasn't very user-friendly in several ways, so I've created a new blog here.

Yesterday, my husband and I went into New York City and took the Circle Line cruise. I work in a high school, and I had the day off for Yom Kippur. We are not Jewish, so, yay, free day for me! My husband has something like fifty million vacation days he needs to take before the end of 2008, so he took a day off yesterday as well. We left our two-year-old son at daycare, as per usual, taking advantage to take the child-free date we'd been fantasizing about since...well, I really don't know when, and drove down to Weehawken to take the ferry over to Manhattan. We then walked slightly north to the Circle Line terminal, arriving in time to purchase our tickets for the three-hour tour that goes around the entire island of Manhattan. *pauses and waits for audience to finish singing "Gilligan's Island" theme*

Yesterday was simply a glorious fall day- breezy, brilliantly sunny, a high in the low seventies. For once, we really lucked out with everything, and I have the pictures to prove it:

This one was taken from the West Side, maybe twenty minutes after we left the pier.

Lady Liberty- I remember being allowed to go up into her crown when I was in third grade, with the Girl Scouts. For those of you who never got to do this (you can now only go up to the pedestel), it's really not that great- it is very small inside, just enough room for one person to go up and the other to go down, and it gets very hot in there!

These next two are of my favorite bridge- the Brooklyn Bridge. I just think it's a very elegant looking bridge, with the stonework. If you ever go to New York, walk across it- it's free, and you can get some great views of the city from there! If you walk all the way across, I hear there's some great retaurants in Brooklyn right there. (I virtually never go to Brooklyn- it's a PITA to get to from NJ!)

This is my favorite building, the Chrysler Building. I've never been inside, and I have been in the Empire State Building, but I have always like the way the top of this building is constructed.

This is the United Nations building. I've been in here, too. Security, as I'm sure you might imagine, is insane. But it's fascinating to see the inner workings of the building- the tour I was on even got to sit in the delegates' seats in the General Assembly chamber!

For those who read the book The Little Red Lighthouse when they were kids, or read it to their kids, these pictures are for you. The lighthouse sits at the base of the George Washington Bridge going from Fort Lee, NJ to Manhattan.