Day 14: We made it to NYC!!

June 8th:  Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? That would be my impatience, not the kids. Nope, the kids are just bouncing off the van walls by now! Today we pulled into the NYC area. That covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it?


We booked a hotel in Secaucus, NJ. It’s very close to Hoboken, and after hauling all our junk into the hotel room, we made our way to the Hoboken waterfront area. I nearly died when I saw the parking conditions. Oh my gosh…..here we are in a 12 passenger van……every street is LINED with cars and the parallel parking along the streets was next to impossible. We ended up doing what most other drivers do I suppose…..we circled. And boy did we let out a loud yee-haw when a space became available that we could actually FIT in!

The next tricky part was figuring out where the heck to eat on our first night. We chose the go to food-pizza!
The sign out front said ‘biggest slices’ so we had to check it out.

We ended up ordering a 32” pizza that was cut into just 8 slices. The restaurant certainly didn’t lie- the slices were pretty darn big slices-

We took the leftovers back with us

and crammed them into Ziploc bags and then into the itty bitty box the hotel calls a refrigerator. Then, the real excitement of the night happened. I got to shop at a Wal-Mart. Oh my word. I think there were 5,000 people there, 4,000 of which were in line trying to check out. The milk cost $4.06 a gallon. Painful…really! I can’t even imagine what the price of milk would have been at a regular grocery store! We have to eat our own breakfast at the hotel-the one they offer is outrageously expensive! At this point, I’m pretty sure we’re going to just have to keep late hours-the kids didn’t tumble into bed until 10:30. Sigh.

Tomorrow’s adventures? A double decker bus tour of NYC, the best way we figured to expose the kids to the wonderment and vast differences NYC has to offer.