Today is our big family trip to Manhattan! We have just enough people that we could not fit in a single car. Francesca drove the Ford Explorer down and I drove the Malibu that we are borrowing from Art. We got up and moving early this morning so that we could get down to the Croton Harmon train station while it was still morning. What an exhausting morning!
The trip down was tiring, but uneventful. We got onto the first non-peak hours train into the city that we could. That all went very well.
We got into the city and pretty quickly got ourselves to Times Square and onto the Big Bus tour of the city. We road the one route all morning doing midtown and uptown. This is actually the first time that the Miller family has done a bus tour in New York City at all. Having lived there for so long, we never really got around to doing it.
For lunch we went to the famous Ellen’s Stardust Diner which was decent but kind of boring and the food was outrageously expensive and if you don’t eat incredibly quickly you see the very short show repeating. It’s mildly interesting but not worth the stop at all.
After lunch we road the second bus loop covering downtown. On this loop the kids got to see my old office at 111 Wall St. as well as my old office at 388 and 390 Greenwich Avenue. No one was very excited to see them, though.
The bus tours were fun. But we were tired quickly from the intense heat. I rode most of the day down below out of the sun with our kids so that they would not overheat. Most everyone else cooked in the bright sun.
When we were done it was some very quick shopping in Times Square. Then back to Grand Central Terminal, some food and on the Metro North back to Croton Harmon station.
The ride home got pretty exciting. Not that far along I84 Francesca’s new Ford Explorer died on the side of the road. Some combination of throttle body and computer issues. We ended up having to loop back for her and thought that we were going to be stranded there for the night. We lost easily an hour dealing with that but it eventually got started and we limped back home with us following her carefully to make sure that they were going to make it. That made for a very long day!