September 24, 2011 End of a vacation

From our hotel room you could see part of the New York skyline

Saturday morning we decided to just drive in to New York. We wanted to go to the Statue of Liberty and decided to park near that. It was expensive parking, but that way we didn't have to take the train around as much.

You can see the new World Trade Center building under construction

     Luckily the weather cooperated for us and it didn’t rain. We couldn’t go up in the statue as they only let a limited amount of people in it, and those tickets where already gone. We did eat breakfast/lunch on the island before returning to the New York side.

     Then we took the subway up to NBC studios where we took a tour. It was really cool. We got to see where Brian Williams films the Evening News, and the set of the Dr. Oz show. The coolest part though was they took us down to the Saturday Night Live set, and they were rehearsing for that night’s show. Apparently that is a very rare thing to get to see them rehearse. Alec Baldwin was the host and it was the season premier. We got to watch them going over an entire skit. We couldn’t really hear them, but it was fun to see the difference between what’s on TV and what you see live.

     After the tour we had to rush back to our car and then the airport. We had to return our car and go through security. Once on the other side of security we had a couple hours to kill, so we ate dinner at a sit down restaurant, which happened to have really slow service.

As I was eating dinner in the airport I had to stop and go take a picture of the beautiful sunset

     The plane that we were going to be using was late coming in so we boarded the plane a half hour late, then we sat on the tarmac for a hour before taking off. The flight home was nice though, I sat next to a really nice lady, and Nate was on the other side. Plus they had free Satellite TV, so we got to watch Saturday Night Live and see the skit we had seen earlier in the day. It was interesting that there were several things that I noticed they had changed to shorten up the scene.

     It was definitely a whirlwind trip, trying to cram as much in as possible in a short period of time, but still leaving a ton of things to do if we ever go back.

     Thanks to Mom and Dad for picking us up and bringing us home, thanks to Matt and Amelia for letting us stay at your house and Rachel and Nivaldo for a nice evening and dinner.