Day 3: I love Sunday, Day of the Diners.

I've been SO excited to post this day, but I just now have time! YAHOO! I realize that I am taking way too long to tell about New York, and I just need to hurry it up already.

SO, we got up at around 8 and checked out of The W by 9, got breakfast, then met up with the boys and started our walk to church. We made a few stops along the way: The Plaza Hotel, and Central Park. Well, Central Park wasn't really a stop- we just had to walk through it to get to church.

The Plaza was beautiful--and so fancy! There was a giant grand staircase, a ballroom with fancy golden chairs, and doormen dressed like in the movies! They also had a giant picture of Eloise (you know, the little girl books?), so here ya go, Elise, I know you were excited about that. Me and Ashley felt all fancy because we went there. And it was perfect because we were in church clothes, so we felt appropriately dress for the place.

Me and Ash outside the Plaza.Stopping to smell the flowers. :)Eloise. This is for you Elise.

I LOVED CENTRAL PARK. This was probably my favorite part of the trip. Honestly, I imagined the park to be kind of gross and run-down. I imagined there to be lots of homeless people and grubby shopping carts and craps all over the place. I was given the impression, somehow, that the park was a dangerous place to go. I didn't think it was ALL going to be gross, just some of it, and that the rest would just look like your average park. Well, I was dead wrong. It was by far, hands down, the prettiest park I have ever seen. There were lots of ponds and bridges that were covered in vines and lots of cute park benches and big, pretty trees. And lots of grass that was mowed just perfectly, and fountains, and sculptures. We were there pretty early in the morning, though, so there weren't a ton of people out yet. When we walked back through after church is wasn't as awesome because it was more crowded and the weather was hotter. But I loved it.

I love park benches. An example of the gorgeousness.This is my frolicking through Central Park. :)

We went to church in the Manhattan Temple. There is a meeting house on the 3rd floor of the temple. It was really cool to see the Angel Moroni suddenly poke up out of nowhere in the middle of New York City. The building was really pretty inside, too, but the air conditioning wasn't working, so pretty much, I just sat there as baked for an hour and a half of an extra long sacrament meeting. Really, it was probably the longest sacrament meeting of my life. We only stayed for sacrament because we had too many things to do! And, since we had met up with everyone for church, there were kind of a lot of us to squeeze in as visitors in their Sunday School classes.

So, instead, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art! It was FABULOUS. There were lots and lots of statues and paintings and every kind of art. The museum is enormous, so we had to pick and choose what we wanted to see. My favorite part was the Greek and Roman art section. I pretty sure that any faithful reader of my blog could have guessed that. I love Greek and Roman things. Especially Roman things, and even more especially things from the Augustan period. The Met gave me exactly those things-- There was a TON of stuff from the Augustan period. Do you realize what that means? Augustan means that it was made during the time of Augustus, aka OCTAVIAN, my favorite guy!! I told everyone, "This is my favorite emperor. Do you have a favorite emperor? Mine is Octavian/Caesar Augustus. And my second favorite is probably Hadrian. But that's mostly because I like his name. But do you know how cool Augustus was?" A lot of people actually wanted to know what he did that was cool. So I told them, and I enjoyed myself. :)Caesar Augustus himself!!!

The museum also had this circular room that had a mural of the buildings and grounds at Versailles, France. There were benches in the middle of the room to sit on, and the lights were kind of dark. This was my second favorite place. After we had been walking for so long, Me, Cameron, and Shawn used this room as a relaxation room. We seriously sat in there for like half an hour, and it was lovely. The murals were really pretty. The three of us agreed that they made us feel like we were actually at Versailles.

After the museum, we rode the subway to Penn Station to buy train tickets to Morristown, New Jersey. We were going to stay at Jon's sister's house that night. :) Oh, I forgot to say that after the museum, Ashley took the bus back to Washington with Matt, Erik, and Ryan. So it was just me, Tanier, Tyson, Cameron, and Adam who were together. Anyway, after we got our tickets, we were all VERY STARVING, and even though it was Sunday, we still had to eat, so we went to a diner by the station. It was kind of a 50's-ish dealio with classic American food. I got this grilled-cheese sandwich thing that sounded really good on the menu, but is was super weird because instead of grilling it, the cheese and meat was melted in between two pieces of French toast. It was soggy and dumb.

Anywho, we decided that our last stop for the night should be ground zero. I had been really excited about this too. We thought it was cool that we were going to go there the night before Memorial Day. They didn't have anything special set up, though. I was really surprised by the whole thing because it was just a construction site. There was a path to go up and look down on the site, but there was nothing to see but construction for new buildings. They are building new towers. The new towers are going to be really cool, but I was disappointed that I didn't get to see the wreckage from 2001. I guess that was dumb of me, because, well, 2001 was like EIGHT years ago. Obviously the wreckage wouldn't still be fresh. I don't know, I just thought it would be preserved some how. That's what I had wanted. It was still really cool, though, and we saw the big steel cross that some firemen had built and stuck on the heaps of burned down/collapsed building. And they had a small exhibit with a timeline- hour by hour- of events. I liked that.

By the time we were done at Ground Zero we realized that we only had about 40 minutes to ride the subway all the way back to the hotel, get our luggage, and then right all the way back to the train station, go through security, then catch our train. We were in a massive, stressful rush, and my feet hurt so bad. I didn't have blisters or anything, but my feet had been walking on shoes with no support and very thin soles for miles and miles. The bottom of my feet felt like they had giant, very tender bruises covering them, and they pulsed with every step I took. It was very miserable. But, we had to hurry, and I had to run. Somehow, some way, we made it, and plopped down into our seats on the train all hot, sweaty, and bothered. I was still in my church clothes, by the way, and I felt disgusting. BUT, the train ride was very pleasant, and it was supposed to take about 2 hours, but I swear it was faster than that. There were official guys that came around to check our tickets after we made every stop. It was an actual passenger train. I honestly didn't know that those things still existed in the United States. They sure don't exist in the west. Sure, in Salt Lake we have the Trax system, but this is like a long distance, you buy a specific ticket kind of train. :)

So, we got to Morristown, New Jersey, and called Jon, our ride to the house where we were going to stay. Jon and Jeff, his partner in crime, had not followed the plan. They were supposed to have left NYC like 2 hours before us, so, accounting for traffic, they would get back to Morristown before us, and be able to pick us up when we got off the train. Well, I don't know when they left NYC, but they were still like an hour out of Morristown in traffic. The five of us who rode the train were not happy campers. And what does one do when they are not a happy camper? They find a place to eat ice cream. I need to add that at this point it was about 11:00pm. We walked down the block a little ways until we came to a little Diner. (This is Diner #2 of the night--- We decided at that point that it was funny to see how many diners we could go to in different states on the same night). We ordered milkshakes, finished them too quickly, then just sat and waited until Jon showed up. It's just so funny when we are in a public setting such as this. It was late at night, everything in the diner was very quiet, and then we show up, and suddenly the diner was a much more lively place. We get comments all the time about how happy we are. The waitress was a little blown away by us because we dragged our luggage in, and then sat around laughing hysterically under the inlfuence of milkshakes for like 2 hours!

Jon finally showed up, we drove to the house, then went immediately to sleep. :)