Visiting the Big Apple

Jenna had been counting down the days. Vicki had been looking forward to getting out of town with Jenna. Both of them returned Sunday night from New York City! They were part of a group of about 50 students and parents who went on a Beta Club trip from school and from the sound of it they've had a blast.

The whole idea for this trip actually came up last year and the date has been changed a couple of times. We've been to meetings and participated in fund raisers and now they've gotten to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The girls left home early Thursday morning in order to meet their group at the airport for an 8:00 am flight. They had great weather to fly in and arrived in the Big Apple around lunch time. From there they stopped by Yankee Stadium on their way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and shopping along Fifth Avenue. Their bus picked them back up around 6:00 to take them to their hotel. This was their early evening.

Friday focused on things to see in Upper Manhattan: the Lincoln Center, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, the Hudson River, the Intrepid, and the American Museum of Natural History. That evening they went to dinner in Times Square and then off to the Nederlander Theatre for a performance of Newsies.

The next day the group went to Lower Manhattan where they spent the morning at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. After lunch they had a guided tour of sights including the 9/11 Memorial, Greenich Village, and Grand Central Terminal. After dinner they went up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building to see the nighttime skyline before returning to their hotel.

Sunday was their last day, but they still squeezed in a trip to Times Square for shopping before their afternoon flight home. We got our exhausted women back around 9:00 that night with orders not to wake them up at all the next day. Good thing Monday was a holiday.

I asked Jenna to write something to summarize their trip and this is what she had to say:

“To sum it all up in a few words, would be impossible. After going to New York, I can officially say I am a country girl, but the experience was amazing. The most jaw-dropping moment to me was seeing Times Square at night. You really just can’t believe it until you see it. That’s not to say the city as a whole wasn’t jaw-dropping (which it was), but Times Square and the Broadway Play were definitely the highlights for me. This is a trip I will never forget, and I hope to get more opportunities like it in the future.”

Joe