Another year is almost over and it wouldn’t be complete with our annual trip to New York City! (2012, 2013,)  My parents had trouble organizing their schedules, so Russ and I went ourselves and navigated the whole thing our own!  If you know us, you know this is quite the accomplishment…

We took Megabus to NYC, which worked out perfectly and wasn’t too expensive.  Within a couple hours, we were there.

Started the day with a cappuccino from Panera…

Walked to Times Square…

And Rockefellar Center…

Then continued our walk to find the correct metro.  Russ eventually figured it out, but I did my best to use my mom’s Handy Dandy MAP!  That woman loves her maps!

We walked through a park and came across a black squirrel.  What is this species?!

And then went to the World Trade Center Memorial Museum to find that the next availability was in 3 hours.

Urban Outfitters and McDonalds kept us warm for 3 hours before going to the museum.  We both felt that the museum was extremely well done, but the majority of the museum was concentrated in ONE exhibit, which we got to within the last hour and a half and didn’t have enough time to see and read everything.  It was a whole lot to take in a process and there were some extremely shocking things, like the voicemails of people that were on the planes, or pictures of people falling from the towers.  Those things completely took my breath away and I spent the rest of the day thinking about what it would have been like if I had been there or someone I knew and loved had been there.  I just can’t imagine.

By the time we got out, we had to quickly catch the metro back uptown to get to our bus on time.  A completely successful day with no catastrophes!