New York, New York

The city that never sleeps. We spent just a few days in NYC and Washington D.C. Felt like we acked so much into our short time here, but in reality, we didn’t even begin to explore the many things there are to do in the respective places.

I rolled up at La Guardia airport on Monday morning, 9am, bleary eyed and a bit unsure of myself. In typical fashion, I hadn’t really made any arrangements with my family for how, when and where they would pick me up from, all the information they had was my flight times. Somehow though, we managed to come together, and we embarked upon a full day’s sight-seeing. At this point, I had already been up for something like 36 hours, so I wasn’t really on top of things!

We visited Central Park which was a really nice place to be, beautiful surroundings, amazing scenery, and we decided to take one of the ‘famous’ horse and carriage tours around the park. What promised to be a remember-forever experience turned out not to be, and I won’t remember it for two main reasons.

1) It was pretty lame! We mostly drove up and down roads, and our guide was on the phone to someone, only turning round every once in a while to tell us “Thees ees where you can play chess” in a romanian/czech accent.

2) I fell asleep.

Obviously, by this point, I was approaching 40 hours without sleep and it was beginning to take it’s toll on me! We ate dinner at the slightly more impressive ‘Planet Hollywood’ restaurant in Times Square, and it was good. We continued to do all the tourist-y stuff in NYC for the next few days...the Empire states building was great, Rockerfeller centre, Statueof Liberty boat cruise, Grand Central Station etc...All of it well worth doing if you find yourself in New York.

We spent a day at a shopping outlet about an hour out of New York City and it was just painful. Anyone who’s been shopping with me can attest to the fact that it jsut doesn’t work well with me, so when I found myself in a massive retail outlet, I did a quick calculation: Matt + 200 plus shops + a whole day = a nightmare. Anyway, I survived the experience with nothing more than a few cuts and bruises, and even bought a nice pair of earphones for my ipod to make the whole experience go quicker!

A day spent in Washington probably wasn’t enough, but we saw plenty of things, including btoh Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the monolith, the white house, the capitol building, the aerospace museum amongst others. However my favourite place of the day to visit strangely enough was the union train station, simply because it had the most amazing food court below it!!! As well as the amazing architecture and so on and so forth.

All in all, plenty to do in New York and Washington, probably needs more time than we can give it though...plus it helps if you stay awake!

Oh, and yes, the tattoo was a spray-on, lasted for 7 glorious days and then faded away! I have no intentions of getting a permanent one!!!

Did you miss it?...

So Hawaii is fast becoming a distant memory, and I'm right into the life of a busy New Yorker!

Since I last blogged, we've had numerous break days, and Older Adult Ministries camp, farewells, two flights, and 3 'new york days'.

So, on our last break days together at camp, a few of us went to the local swap meet which is a kind of huge-scale market. I was reluctant to go at first, as the thought of shopping didn't exactly enthrall me. However, in the blazing heat, we trailed around a large stadium, going from stall to stall, and I must say, it was one of the most fun afternoons I've spent in Hawaii other than with the kids! Astonishingly low prices, lots of variety, and good company meant that we had a great time...and age the local economy a boost! And I got a tatoo.

We did a variety of things on the other days, includig our big farewell banquet at a nice uptown restaurant, and a visit to Pearl Harbor. This was a particularly moving experience, with guided tours, movies, examinations of one of the sunken ships, and seeing some of the survivors of the attacks there on the day, it was an emotional few hours.

On our last evening at camp, after going for another big dinner at another restaurant (it's a hard life) some of us decided that we didn't want to spend our last hours in Hawaii asleep...so we pulled an all-nighter. To be honest, I don't remember alot of that night, other than writing in people's books and spending time with people, I'm not entirely sure what else we did! However we did try and see our first Hawaiin sunrise after being assured of it's beauty. The plan was great, we were going to set our alarms for 5.30am just incase we forgot about it, and go and lie on the beach and watch the sun come up. The only problem was we forgot to not sleep, and ended up napping for half an hour...through the alarm! So we got up and went to the beach, but it was already fairly light, and clouds were obscuring our view of the sun anyway so it was a lost task!

Nethertheless, it was a good evening, and we enjoyed spending time with eachother before having to say an emotional farewell the following morning!

Just in case you thought you had misread...yes I did say I now have a tatoo. It's a little manly flower on my foot, picure to go up on facebook soon!

I'll put up a reflection on the whole camp at a later date, but suffice to say, it was an amazing experience, one I shall never ever forget.