Epic Roadtrip 2012, Part Two

So, stop #2 is NYC. Seth's good friend has a condo in Union Square. We crashed with him for two nights. 

This is the boys on the subway. They LOVED the subway. I always wanted to raise my kids in the city, so they could ride the subway and eat street food and generally be much cooler than suburban kids. But then reality hit and I couldn't deal with all the stresses of raising two little boys in Chicago and  sending them to public schools and never having enough room for guests. Anyway, I digress. My kids loved the subway. They loved trying to stand up and hold the pole and not fall down. Sort of urban surfing, I guess. 

This is us standing in line for the Staten Island Ferry. Did you know it's free? Neither did I. But it is. I love ferries. 

The midgets hugging and spotting the Statue of Liberty.

We had lunch at A Salt & Battery. There are not enough words to express how much I love this place. The fish and chips are outstanding. They sell Shandy. The guys who work here are from working-class England (or at least sound like it; adds to the authenticity, I think). We finished things with a deep-fried Mars bar. Yeah, you heard that right. Deep-fried Mars bar.

This is a view from The High Line. It's an above ground walking park in Manhattan. A park they built on an abandoned elevated train line. It's really cool and lovely. And the views are amazing, as you can imagine. 

They had both had their fill of walking, and we had had our fill of them. So we stuffed them both into our borrowed stroller and went to Dylan's Candy Bar--the biggest candy store in the world (so says Dylan [Ralph Lauren's daughter, fyi]). This could have been a total disaster, but we managed to get in and out with a small bag of candy for each of them. And then they had their meltdown.

That night we got street food and then went out for ice cream. YYY (Seth's friend) is serious about his ice cream, so we headed over to a restaurant in Union Square and had a toasted marshmallow shake. It has, of course, a toasted marshmallow on top, but the whole shake tastes that way. It's amazing. Frankly, I was bitter about sharing it. From there we got herbal shakes from a street vendor.

By this time it was around 9pm and both boys were getting tired and grumpy. So, we went to another place!! Harry was going on and on about how all he wanted in the world was cherry gelato and he could never be truly happy if he didn't get cherry gelato (or something along those lines). So we ordered him a cherry gelato cone. But since it was fancy gelato and not the cheap ice cream we usually buy, it wasn't cherry-colored. It was white. And then Harry proceeded to lose his *%^&a* on the sidewalk in the middle of Manhattan. So while we and a million others were milling about, enjoying our evening and the food, Harry was sitting on a bench crying and yelling, "I don't want cherry ice cream!! I wanna go to bed!!!" And a nice gentleman stopped and looked at him and said, "well, this looks fun." And it was, actually, all tantrums aside.  NYC was so much fun.