We turned up at Fort Clinton at a sprightly (for us) 11am, our pre-purchased CityPass tickets for the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island ferry in hand. And then we stopped. And stared. Holy cow! Where did all of these people come from? Just nearby and all over the world apparently judging by the accents. We turned tail (and made plans to come back again much, much earlier on another day).
The good part about having over-traveled children is that they just rolled with the Ellis Island change-of-plans. We hopped on a subway uptown with revised plans for the day.
For me, travel is about visiting new places, seeing new things, basically re-gaining joy and wonder – things that the daily work-school-housework will grind into oblivion. Joy and wonder, however, are exhaustingly difficult to elicit from my over-traveled children which is why I will treasure the looks on their faces when we walked into Times Square for a long time. The unexpected April sunshine made everything sparkle, and the crowds weren’t too bad (obviously everyone was standing around Battery Park instead!!). Times Square worked its’ magic on my teenage boys and I couldn’t stop grinning.
We touristed at the Rockefeller Center where my ultra-geek challenged himself to name all the flags (achievement unlocked). Bet you didn’t know that the flags of both North Korea and Somalia are flown outside this center of American capitalism!
We ended our sightseeing day with a quick stop “for a drink at the Rooftop cafe” in the Metropolitan Museum leading B to challenge “I see what you’re doing here, squeezing in culture and thinking we won’t notice!”. “What? Who? Me? Never!”
