New York

Our original plan had us leaving Richmond and shooting up the east coast to the Northeast through New York. Honestly, the plan sort of horrified me because it meant that I needed to tow the Airstream through that craziness. As luck would have it, we got to start our trip early (i.e. work cut me loose).

So, we decided to take the train up from Richmond to New York instead. We decided to wait until the night we got back from NYC to move onto the Airstream. This kept us away from all the traffic and potholes that NY and NJ has to offer and allowed the kids to have their first train ride. Win all around.

New York was awesome as only New York can be. We got there on a Monday night tired and hungry and our room wasn’t ready. That normally would have been a bummer, but we got hooked up with bar vouchers and free breakfast for the week (Egghead is the bomb). We finally got our room and it was actually smaller than the Airstream to not get us all spoiled. Win all around again. We went out looking for some authentic NY food and immediately found a Chipotle.

Next stop on night one was Times Square. That place is awesome all lit up a night with enormous ads for all the things we want and don’t need, so it really made me stop and think. Times Square seems like the perfect antithesis to what we are trying to do on this trip. We want to slow down, spend more time together and not have so much stuff weighing us down. Sounded like a great plan until we hit the Lego store a couple days later.

We spent the next three days walking around the city seeing the Today Show, Top of the Rock, The Vessel, Central Park, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, China Town, Little Italy, the 911 Memorial, lots of awesome architecture, some fun stores, and the biggest and best darn fireworks show of all time on the 4th where Jamie’s vigilance thwarted a potential terrorist attack (or not – funny story for another time). Best 67,000 steps ever.

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While New York was great, we can’t wait to slow down a bit and get out into the great wide open. We took the train back to Richmond, emptied our temporary storage unit, loaded it all into the truck, picked up the Airstream and towed it to Ashland where we showed how amateur we are for RVers embarking on a one year trip as we tried to back into a campsite for a good 15 minutes or so at 10pm. But, we finally made it. Time to provision and have one last going away party as we can see Center of the Universe brewery from our campsite.