The End of the Trip

We visited the American Museum of Natural History for our final New York City outing.  Not only does Caleb love all museums in general, but he's a huge fan of the "Night at the Museum" movies, so he'd been looking forward to this attraction all week long.

Which train should we take to get there, Anna?

I love the subway.  The platforms are terribly dirty (we only spied two rats the whole week, though) but the trains are efficient and get you anywhere you want to go.  So very convenient.

JP Morgan Chase employees get free admission to New York's best museums.  Since we had two such employees in our family, their corporate badges allowed our entire clown car to enter the museum free of charge!  Cool beans.

The kids found Teddy:

And cougars, our favorite animals, of course:

We saw Rexy and Dum Dum, too.

It was hard to look away from this disturbing exhibit:

The ocean life exhibit is really neat (and quite dark.)  Guests are encouraged to lie down under the massive whale to get an appreciation for its size.  That is all of my family members on the floor right there:

We had Shake Shack for lunch.  Caleb gave it two thumbs down.  I thought it was quite delicious, but probably not worth the $70 price tag.  Seventy dollars to feed my family fast food!  And besides that, the line was long and all the tables occupied.  So we ate on park benches across the street.

We took one final stroll through Central Park; peeked in on a wedding, counted more turtles and stopped briefly at the playground.

Clara and Lys snuck in a few last minutes of cousin bonding.

On our way back to the hotel to pick up our luggage, I paused in front of Jimmy Fallon's studio to express my disappointment in him. (I have a crush on Jimmy Fallon.)

Jon had been learning the process of obtaining Fallon tickets for months before our trip.  The day the July tickets were released, Jon took the day off of work to focus all his attention on securing them. He had two computer screens ready and we would've had them, except that he wasn't filming the week we were there.  Boo!

Someday, Jimmy, I'm coming back to New York City and you'd better have a seat for me.

It was hard to say goodbye.  It had been a most fantastic trip.  I asked Caleb for his New York 5-star ratings.

Smelly: 3.5 stars

Dirty: 3.5 stars

Noisy: 5 stars

Cool: an enthusiastic 5 stars!

We all loved it.  Every bit of it!

How was our trip?  We each chose one word:

Incredible. Amazing. Awesome. Memorable. Breath-taking.