Central Park -New York

Yesterday afternoon we took the kids to New York City. Technically we spent the majority of the day at Central Park so they weren't really seeing the city, but in my opinion Central Park is the best part of the city. That being said I really haven't seen much of the city either so I'm obviously a poor source. All I know is that I prefer the beautiful, quiet serenity of the park to the crowded, noisy, busyness of the city streets. Whenever I've watched movies about New York I thought it was exaggerated, but it really isn't. There are so many people and traffic jams and taxis and taxis and taxis everywhere! What a blessing to the people living in this area to have a beautiful retreat. It really is an amazing place and pictures just can't capture the immensity and beauty.

Before we hit the park we took the kids to see the Manhattan Temple. In all actuality this is the REAL sanctuary in New York City. Because property is so expensive in New York this temple also includes all the features of a meetinghouse/chapel. The temple is on the first floor and the fourth and fifth floor. The third floor is the chapel complete with kitchen and basketball court and all. The second floor is offices, distribution center and maybe some other things. This temple is described as a building within a building- which effectively blocks out the noise of horns, sirens, etc of the New York streets. This allows the patrons to truly leave the world behind.

Central Park is home to 21 playgrounds- we visited 3 of them. We also visited the castle which serves as a weather station and a great place to get a view of the park.

Although not official playgrounds, throughout the park there are huge clusters of rocks to climb, jump and slide on. I think my kids had as much fun on the rocks as they did in the actual playgrounds.

I could have spent the whole day just looking at the leaves changing colors- Fall is by far my favorite season. I love it when there is a nip in the air and beautiful colors all around.

I think the highlight of the day was the canoe ride around the lake. We had two boats one for the boys and one for the girls so everyone had a chance to paddle around. The kids LOVED it!

It's amusing to see the creative ways people make a living in New York. There are artists and musicians throughout the park, but there are also some kid oriented showmen. Such as the jugglers, giant bubble blowers and the hula hoop teacher. We got sucked in! Here we are putting on a hula hoop show for all the passerbys :) Rusty took a video, but I'll leave it to your imagination.

We even got sucked into taking a carriage ride through the park with Charlie Brown and Crazy Joe. I'll let you decide which was the horse and which was the driver. Ben was so happy that the horse had a special device to eliminate the need for a pooper scooper upon elimination.

In the evening we explored a bit of the "city" of New York City. We visited the famous FAO Schwartz Toy Store, and the kids even played the Big Piano- as seen in the movie Big. The toy store also had some huge stuffed animals and some fun Lego sculptures. We visited Rockefeller Center, but at $20 a person we opted out of the iceskating and trip to the top of the Tower. It is just mind boggling how tall the buildings in New York are. When we first arrived I was showing Katie some of the tall buildings, and the clouds were moving behind them. She got a little nervous because it looked like the building was moving. It was a little creepy to me when I imagined what a serious earthquake could do to this city.

We stopped by the M&M store and the Hershey Store as well. What a difference. The M&M store was 3 levels filled with every possible item on which they could think to slap an M&M. It was a marketing dream store. The Hershey store was tiny, with only a few rows of candy and T-shirts. Of course they did hand out Hershey Kisses and give the kids factory worker hats and let them spin the wheels of the candy machine to fill buckets of candy. Ben reported this as one of the best parts of his day, so I guess they did something memorable.

By now we were all getting pretty tired, but we had to make a quick stop at Time Square just to say we've been there. You can see that the kids are looking pretty pooped.

Because we had a LONG walk back to our car we stopped for a quick icecream cone to break it up on the way. What a fun day!!