Philadelphia Stop

We stopped in Philadelphia on our way into New York.

We didn't have a lot of time, but had enough time to check out the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall!

Luckily, the line wasn't too bad to see it up close.

I felt SO far away from home.  

I felt like we would definitely win the "came the farthest to see this" award . . .

But then I learned that the people who took our family picture above were from Idaho.

We were not able to get tickets to tour Independence Hall, but we walked around it and went into the Visitor's Center as well.  This situation is something else I wish we had done differently.

Online tickets were no longer available, but we might have had a chance at
getting tickets to Independence Hall if we could have been there 

around 8am . . . or earlier?  Our original plan was to drive to Philadelphia after spending the day in D.C..  We had a room reserved . . . that way Ben could get up early to get in line for the tickets.

But when we checked into our hotel in D.C., we were a little tired . . . and the idea of packing up the car again in the morning felt a little daunting.  We thought it might be better to spend the whole day and evening there and not feel like we still have a 2 hour drive ahead of us (which really is nothing at this point, right?  But still).  So we chose to stay in our hotel in D.C. instead, and planned to drive to Philadelphia in the morning after the D.C. day . . . knowing we would probably not be able to get tickets, but figured maybe we would see more in Washington D.C..

But since the kids wore out much quicker than I thought they would in D.C., it would have been just fine to have that 2 hour drive at the end of the day.  So . . . I wish we had done that :(

BUT . . . the kids really liked having some time to swim in the pool and just be out of the car . . . which wouldn't have happened with our original plan.

After spending what felt like a minute in Philadelphia, we drove into New York!

Here we are in front of our Manhattan apartment for the week!

It was so fun to feel like we could move in for awhile, and leave our car behind.

We unpacked our things, and then took our car over to Queens (much cheaper parking) to leave it in a garage for the week.  The apartment we were staying in had no parking, and really I am not sure where we would have parked it anywhere we went.  Cars seem really inconvenient there.

We bought 7 day unlimited subway passes . . . and began our New York adventure!

Washington D.C.

We had ONE day to spend in Washington D.C.!

Because we had heard it is hard to park close to anything in Washington D.C., we left our car near our hotel and rode the subway in.  

We decided to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum first.

It is a pretty awesome museum!

 

Here, the Ben and kids are standing in front of 

the Appollo 11 Command Module that actually went to space!

After exploring the museum, we had some lunch in a very fancy McDonalds :).

Then we headed to the White House!

It is pretty, but not as majestic as I had imagined.  We were not able to get a tour inside, but it was fun to walk around the outside.  I think it would be weird to live in a house with so much security surrounding it.  There were security guards everywhere . . . and tourists taking pictures :).

From the White House, we went to see the Washington Monument and then on over to the Lincoln Memorial.  These sights were a little farther apart than Ben had remembered, so the kids felt like they were walking SO MUCH :)

It was a good warm up of what was to come in NYC though . . . where I knew we would be leaving our car in a parking garage and riding a train around for a week :)

I LOVED the Lincoln Memorial.  It was my favorite thing we saw in D.C.

The kids were worn out after these activities.  The late afternoon was spent swimming in the hotel pool, eating dinner, and going to bed!  The day was AWESOME! 

 If I could do it again though, I would have arranged for one of those BIG BUS tours where you can hop on/hop off.  It would have been a good way to see more sights in a short amount of time.

But we had a great time, and we saw what we had planned on seeing.

East Coast Vacation: Driving Out East

Ben needed to be in New York City and Cincinnati for work this summer.  His family wanted to get together at his sisters' home in New Hampshire, and he had possible work to do in Nauvoo . . . all in the month of June.

We made the ambitious decision for ALL of us to go.  We would DRIVE to all these places that Ben needed to be for work . . . and mix in visiting family, sightseeing and stopping at church history sites along the way!  Since many of our locations were work related, our trip was heavily subsidized . . . we also had family to stay with for a little while . . . which made taking this trip seem like a no-brainer!

The trip took about 4 weeks to complete.

Here we are at the beginning of our trip.  We decided to spend the first 3 days of our trip just getting out east.  It took about 3 days of driving 9-12 hours a day to get to Washington D.C., which was our first destination.

Our first day, we drove from Springville, UT to Kearney, NE.  This was the farthest east the kids and I had ever been!

The second day, we drove from Kearney, NE to South Bend, IL . . . home of Notre Dame.  Ben of course needed to stop and check it our for a minute :)

Our third day in the car, we drove from South Bend, IL to Washington D.C.

The kids did awesome in the car.  

We had lots of food and sandwich stuff to eat.  

I had even pre-made meals for us to eat in the hotels each night.  

We had lots of movies and listened to some of the book Fablehaven along the way.  

By the time we got to D.C., we could not believe that we had driven that far from our home!

By that time we were also ready for a day NOT in the car :)