We had run out of the big things we wanted to do in New York and everyone was pretty tired of running around, so it was a very slow morning. We finally got everyone out into the streets for a very long walk to the bottom end of Manhattan. Our first destination was the NYC Fire Department Museum, but the walk down took so long that we ended up needing lunch before we got there. However, our walk south had taken us out of midtown and all of its restaurants and into the NYU campus / Greenwich Village, where all we could find were trendy restaurants (aka "my kids won't eat there"). Stymied, we ended up eating a meagre lunch of hot dogs from a stand in a park, and these hot dogs were a pale comparison to the hot dogs we ate in Central Park.
"Fortified" by lunch, we went through the museum, which had a lot of old artifacts and a few really old fire fighting vehicles. It also had a 9/11 memorial, which contained pictures of all the FDNY personnel that lost their lives in the attack, as well as a bunch of recovered FDNY equipment still covered in dust. The museum ended up not taking very long to visit, so we headed farther south to see the actual 9/11 memorial. Along the way we passed Ladder Company No. 8, which is famous for being the building used in the original Ghostbusters movie. I was excited to see it, but unfortunately the building is currently undergoing renovations and is covered in scaffolding and nets. They have painted Ghostbuster-esque pictures on the sidewalk in front of the building, but it was a bit of a letdown.
The 9/11 memorial is two large waterfalls that occupy the footprint of the two buildings, with all the names of everyone who died engraved in the wall surrounding the waterfalls. There were quite a lot of people there and the lineup for the museum was very long, so we skipped that and just looked at the waterfalls and tried to explain to the kids the significance of what had happened.
Everyone was quite tired from walking at this point, so I decided that we would take the subway back to Times Square in order to reduce the amount of walking we had to do. I also wanted to ride the subway once while I was here. However, New York's subway is ancient and not setup for anything other than people, so getting the stroller in and out was an adventure. Washington's setup is much nicer - each entrance has a wheelchair gate that is wider than the others and you can take your stroller through that gate. Where we entered here, you had to catch the attention of the booth worker, scan your ticket and then have them open a side door for you. The exit had no easy way out, though as I was folding up the stroller, a worker arrived and pushed open an emergency exit and told me that I should always use that. (Honestly, it had big red letters on it that said an alarm would sound if it was opened.) Colour me unimpressed with the NYC subway, at least with children.
At Times Square we headed to a pizza shop we had passed yesterday which I had learned was one of the better pizzerias in the area. It was extremely good. It was also extremely small, designed for walkup traffic that left with their food and not a family of six that required 3 or 4 seats for the younger kids to eat. We managed to eat in waves in order to maximize our use of the 2 counter seats we obtained (out of the 4 in the restaurant) and Jonathan ate in the stroller out front. The pizza was really good and all the kids liked it. To finish off the day, we went to the McDonald's in Times Square for milkshakes. It was a zoo in there, but we managed to find some seats and enjoy our dessert. Then it was our final walk back to our apartment, where we got everything ready to go for tomorrow. We head out on a train to Syracuse, where we rent a car and drive to Penn Yan, which is just slightly north of Watkins Glen.
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