From Sea to Shining Sea: New York City

I may have spent over 24 years living in the States (and been a resident for almost 27 years now), but I have yet to see much of it. My family didn't travel much; we made it over to Branson, Missouri two years in a row when I was in middle school, but that was the extent.

In high school, my senior year, I finally began going places, albeit slowly. A few of my friends and I made it to Chicago for our senior skip day, and then right after our graduation a bunch of us made a road trip out to Colorado to surprise our friend at his graduation (he had moved out there about a year previously). We saw his small city and also took in some of the sights of Colorado Springs.

The summer after my first year of college (2001) my good friend Amanda and I road-tripped over to North Carolina to stay with her grandparents for about a week. It was my first time seeing the ocean!! We had a great time, hanging out in Wilmington, going to a small island, and even driving down to Myrtle Beach for a day. Before heading back to Illinois we went up to Washington, DC for about a day and a half, and then we went to NYC for one day. We managed to see quite a lot and a had a good time.

Unfortunately, all of my photos from those trips were taken pre-digital camera. Therefore, I do not have photos from those travels to share with you.

Instead I will begin my photo travel blog with a few photos from my second trip to NYC, which was about 2.5 years after my first day trip (Dec 2003-Jan 2004). My bestest friend ever, Angela, and I spent a week in NYC in the middle of my fourth year of college. She was getting married that spring, and we figured it may be our last chance to take a trip together. It had also been a dream of a few of us to celebrate New Year's in Times Square, so we wanted to make it a reality. The two of us stayed at a nice hotel (nice, but small room) not too far from downtown NYC. We went to some of the great museums (including the Met and the Natural History museum); painted our own trivets; saw the major sites (Empire State building, Statue of Liberty, Ground Zero, Times Square - more than just on New Year's Eve, etc); went to a filming of the Today show (but they never showed us on TV :(); walked around Central Park; went to Harlem (and Spanish Harlem); meandered around the major shopping districts; went to a club; and even saw a musical on off-broadway.

I only have 3 photos from our trip; my previous laptop crashed in the summer of 2007 before I backed-up all my files, so I lost almost all of my photos taken since I first got a digital camera (back in 2002).

Empire State Building, ferry over to Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty: