NYC, Philly, and Some Helicopters

June 29, 2018
Ian
Uncategorized

After Boston and Rhode Island, we crashed at my cousin Kaitlian’s house on a rare weekend that they allow people into her work for family day at Sikorsky, where they make the Black Hawk helicopters. It was an extensive and well done tour for something that only happens once every couple of years!

Afterwards we had a few busy days booked. Not surprisingly, some of the most packed cities that we visited were also the ones I took the least pictures of.

At the big apple we stayed in Brooklyn at a small AIRbnb and left Harper with some sitters. We took a boat ride to tour Ellis Island, and asked some folks to take our picture, and they centered on us with no Statue in the background! Luckily we found another couple who knew at least a little about what they were doing.

Visited The Met to see Washington crossing the Delaware:

Then Central Park, The USS Intrepid museum with a retired SR-71 (you can see it hidden in the back of this pic:

And followed up that night at Times Square, which felt the most touristy of all!

We also checked out the 9/11 Memorial (super well done), and the One World Trade center right next to it:

And the wall street Bull right next to it. We also ate at Ben’s Pizzaria from the TV show Louie. The next night we had drinks on a rooftop bar called Westside in Brooklyn next to our room which had an incredible view of the NYC skyline. We didn’t think to bring the camera, but we’d highly recommend a Brooklyn rooftop bar at night to anyone traveling to NYC.

We of course had to visit the Top of the Rock to see the Empire state building standing in the city:

Back to back with that we caught up with Kate’s dad in Philly! Philly was an amazing city that we liked more than we thought. I’m not sure I would go again because we hit a lot of it in the three days we were there, but definitely worth it for one trip.

We walked down the oldest continuously inhabited street in the U.S., Elfreth’s Alley.

And went on a tour at State Penn, which is the first Penitentiary in the world to try isolated confinement as a correctional method. It failed with good intentions, but was one of my favorite things on the entire east coast. It was abandoned for years before being picked up as a memorial, and they left it in it’s run down state for a really creepy vibe. It had an entire day’s worth of audio tour options if you were motivated enough to run through all of them, along with a follow up exhibit on the existing state of the prison system in the U.S.

We of course had to head to the top of Philly as well, in Liberty Tower 1.

We took a great walking tour that ran us by the liberty bell, the Betsy Ross house, the oldest Bank, the Rocky steps, Edgar Allan Poe’s last house, and ate at the oldest pup in Pennsylvania.