Day 4, New York City

We started the day in New Jersey, taking a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. We had made reservations weeks in advance to go up to the crown. Lucky we did. By doing so we got to go to the front of the 300-or-so person line and save two plus hours of extra waiting time. Only groups of 10 were allowed in the crown at a time, and it took us about 5 minutes to climb the 354 stairs. The view from the top was amazing. In the crown we had the opportunity to get a closer look at the tablet and torch, and experience a great view of NYC. Afterwards, we made our way back down through the observation deck and pedestal, taking dozens of pictures along the way. The statue was so beautiful, we had to capture it from every angle.

After we were finished with Lady Liberty, we made our way to the Staten Island Ferry. We had so many things we wanted to do in New York, we didn't know where to start. The first thing we needed to do though was purchase a Metro Card (pre-loadable subway ticket) as we didn't want to have to walk all over Manhattan. We made our way to the furthest thing on our to-do-list which was Central Park. It's hard to believe that a park, hundreds of acres in size, would be in the middle of such a large city. We walked around for about two hours, mainly stopping to see the fountains, Shakespeare's Garden, and Belvidere Castle.

Our next stop was 30 Rockefeller Plaza. There wasn't a lot we could do here except take pictures of the Today Show building and the golden statue of Prometheus, but it was still worth the stop as we are all big fans of the 30 Rock TV show.

We were working our way back to the Staten Island Ferry and made our last stop the World Trade Center area. We were expecting to see some kind of memorial, but the Freedom Tower was already under construction. The whole area was blocked off by a giant curtain, but we managed to find an opening where we could look in. Standing there it was hard to imagine the devastation that took place on 9/11.

We then hurried to catch the next available Staten Island Ferry, wanting to be able to have a bench seat after all the walking we had done today. Once we were back at our car, we drove off to our hotel in New Haven, CT with another day's worth of site-seeing behind us.