Epic East Coast - Day 5

Today was our first train travel day and I'm going to rate it a solid "meh".  There are a lot of perks to traveling by train, but it is S.....L....O...W.  We boarded the train at 8:00am and arrived in New York at 10:40pm, which was 50 minutes late.  That is over 14.5 hours on a train, which is a ridiculously long time.

As it was such a long time, there were a lot of highs and a lot of lows.  The highs included all the extra room that made the trip comfortable, the super easy access to downtown Toronto and downtown New York (no difficult cab rides with kids, due to not having car seats), the few times the kids cuddled up to me to watch the trees go by.  The lows included extremely questionable food choices (reheated cheeseburgers / sandwiches or microwavable pizzas), an extremely slow moving food line (it took me almost an hour to get lunch, and I was 8th in line), having kids freak out at each meal because something in the limited questionable food choices was not to their liking, and Bradley getting grumpy because 14.5 hours in a train is too much for a three year old.

Anyway, we finally arrived in New York and I was a bit concerned because it was so late and our hotel stopped check-ins at midnight.  However, it was close enough to Penn Station (about 3 blocks) that we quickly found it.  Penn Station was not stroller friendly, but New Yorkers were.  We got to the stairs / escalators and got the young kids out of the stroller, at which point two guys asked if we needed any help, so one of them carried the stroller up the escalator while Sandra and I walked up the stairs with the kids.

It was 11pm, 28C (and we had thrown our jackets on, in case it was cool - big oops), and very busy.  New York doesn't seem to care about it being late.  The streets were busy, the restaurants full of people and most of the stores were still open.  As we were putting the kids back in the stroller, Evan exclaimed "there is a New York police car!", and he ended up counting seven of them on our walk to the hotel.  We got checked in and into our room, which has a beautiful view of the Empire State Building out of the window.  The kids were overtired and excited, so it took some time to get everyone into bed, but we finally got everyone asleep.  Tomorrow we have one day in New York to do a little bit of sightseeing (as this is really just a layover on our way to Charlotte).  It's actually not the best use of our time (as we run all the way down to Charlotte, just to turn around and come back to Washington DC), but we were constrained by the times that were available for the Richard Petty Driving Experience.