Vacation!

Warning - this is super long. I don't really expect anyone else to get through it but I'm doing it so I will have a good record of our trip. Once again my ultra-generous parents took us and my brother's family on an amazing vacation - this time on a New England cruise! It's a trip really more suited for older kids but neither Jeff or I had ever been there so when my parents suggested it as an idea we said sure thing :)  The boat sailed out of New York and since we had never been there either we decided to go a day early and spend a day in the city first. What could possibly go wrong dragging five little kids around New York?

Our day started super early while it was still dark out. I had hoped that the kids might go back to sleep in the car on the way to the airport but they were so excited there was no chance of that. They kept pointing out things like lights in the distance and saying how different everything looked - like we had never driven anywhere during the dark at night before. It was kind of cute. By the time we got up to board the plane we had missed early family boarding and the flight was almost full so we had to split up. Jeff and Charlie took one seat, Dayton was all on his own, Ellie was with my mom, my dad was alone, and I was next to Tucker and across the aisle from Duncan. Everyone did fantastic! I seriously cannot believe how good they were...the guy Dayton was sitting next to walked up to me a couple of times to tell me how great Dayton was doing. And I didn't hear Charlie cry once.

We had a quick layover in Chicago, just long enough to grab some McDonald's, and then we landed in Newark. Duncan was very excited when two minutes into the airport we saw one of these:

The whole rest of the trip we saw them all over and each time Duncan would make a big deal out of it and it drove Dayton nuts. He couldn't stand it that Duncan thought he was so cool for having a donut place named the same as him.

So we took the train from Newark into Manhattan and from there it was almost thirty blocks to our hotel. We didn't really want to try and navigate the subway with all our luggage so we decided to walk. When we first walked out from the train/subway station it was really awesome to see everything. Seemed just like on TV. But after a LONG time walking, making everyone hold hands non-stop, and dealing with six suitcases between everyone's stuff I was over it. Thank goodness my parents were with us to help with hand-holding. Well, my mom helped anyway....my dad kept forgetting and letting go so he was banned from helping. As a reminder of what a nice, sheltered life we live here in Utah, when we had been walking awhile Tucker tugged on my hand and asked me where everyone got the little sticks that smoke came out of. Ha!

We just got a quick, not very good dinner that night at a little deli a few minutes away from our hotel and by the time we went to 'sleep' (sharing a double bed with Charlie and Tucker does not a restful night make) I was thinking we had made a major mistake in trying to see NY before the cruise. But the next morning things were looking up. We stopped at Dunkin' Donuts (Duncan's first one ever I think) and took them to Central Park for breakfast. Then we decided to go over to the Manhattan Temple before we explored the rest of the park. I didn't realize that it had the angel Moroni on top....it was pretty cool to see in the middle of everything. They let the kids look through the front door at all the pretty stained glass and then we went up to the third floor which is like a regular meetinghouse - it looked just the same as the inside of any other church.

We didn't get to see all of Central Park, but we got through a good bit of it...the kids' favorite thing was finding acorns. We don't have the right kind of trees around here so they were stuffing their pockets with them. We kept having to pull them away to go see the next thing.

My favorite place was called Sheep's Meadow - it was this huge open area and it was so nice for the kids to be able to just run free without me worrying about them bothering anyone. Charlie even got to get out of the stroller - what a treat! He practically lived in that thing throughout the trip. I wanted to take the kids to the Central Park Zoo, which cost way too much and was pretty much the same as any other zoo but we did it anyway because we never go to the zoo at home so why not? On our way over there we walked right past Jennifer Garner! She was there just hanging out with her kids. We used to love Alias years ago so we thought it was way cool.

Towards the end of the time there I saw Big Bird and Elmo sitting on a bench from the back. I thought Sesame Street was doing a fun little thing for kids and I was super surprised that there wasn't a big line already. So we went over and then I realized that they weren't exactly the real deal. But they were close enough so we got a cute picture. Then as the kids were walking back to us Elmo started waving a dollar around and I realized why the person was willing to sit on a bench in a costume in the heat. Apparently it's a thing there to hang around crowded places and get money for pictures.

After the park we went down to the 9/11 memorial and got to take the subway there....our hotel was really close to the park so we had walked everywhere up to this point...the kids were absolutely exhausted and so were we - I kept having to carry Ellie and occasionally Tucker when they got too tired. At one point Jeff put Charlie on his shoulders and Tucker sat in the stroller with Ellie on his lap. I wish we could have brought a double stroller but with the space being so tight on the cruise I had to go small. I really can't get across the amount of walking that spending a day in NY entailed. My feet and legs have never hurt so bad in my life. Plus even though it was early October it was hot and humid. Anyways, the subway was fine. Clean and brightly lit. Having never been anywhere that big before I really was pretty proud of ourselves for navigating our way around so well, especially keeping track of so many kids. Speaking of, we were a huge novelty everywhere we went on the whole East Coast. I can't count how many times people asked me if the kids were all mine.

So after the memorial we went to a place called Shake Shack for dinner which we had heard was pretty good and had decent prices. We walked there (of course) and then found a huge line coming out and going down the sidewalk. But it went pretty fast and we got our food without any hassle. The problem came when we tried to find a seat. There was not a single place to sit in the whole restaurant - nevermind for 9 of us. (My parents stayed with us in NY...Chris and Holly's family was there too but they had their own plan and we were way too slow). So I stood there with all the kids and a tray piled with food while Jeff and my mom hung around tables where people looked like they were almost done, hoping to snag one as soon as someone left. Finally a couple in a booth came over and said that since 'I had SO MANY kids' and there were only two of them that we could take the booth and they would find another spot. So nice of them. 

After dinner we walked over to Times Square. It was pretty dang cool. I knew there was a giant Toys R Us there that was supposed to be pretty neat so we went there first. It was awesome inside. There was a giant ferris wheel with all different toy-themed cars that went through all three (!) floors of the store. The kids and I went on it because really, how could you not? They had giant displays of all different kinds of stuff but my favorite was the Lego area. They had all the major NY buildings made out of Legos plus a few more things. My favorite was The Hulk.

So awesome. (Notice Ellie's cute NY shirt I found clearanced at Old Navy :) )

It was getting really late and Jeff had already bailed and taken Charlie back to the hotel to go to bed and the rest of us were on our way back as well when I saw the Disney Store!! My parents grudgingly agreed to go in - they don't quite get my obsession with that store - and it was way worth it. For starters it had two floors, a little Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for the kids to go in, and a giant Lightning McQueen. On the top floor there was also a huge castle front with every princess dress up imaginable inside. And when you went down the escalator they had a ton of the Tangled floating lanterns hanging from the ceiling the whole way down. Super pretty. Now as much as I love this store I hardly ever buy anything in it b/c everything is ridiculously expensive. But I was so excited to find one rather large item that was actually a really good price that I got to save for Ellie's birthday. When we were leaving the hotel the next morning Jeff noticed the bag and complained for a good ten minutes about having to haul another bag around and why did I have to buy anything there anyways b/c I could have gotten it at home. But since the NY store was way huger than ours I wasn't sure if ours would have it. And I don't believe in paying for shipping. And it ended up being a good thing anyways b/c it was more room to hold our souvenirs from all the stops on the cruise. So there.

The next day was cruise day! We let the kids sleep in since they they had been up until past 11 the night before and past 10 the night before that and then just packed up and...wait for it....walked to the ports. With all the luggage. After waiting in a gigantic line we were finally on the boat! First thing we went and loaded plates up with food - hands down the best part of any cruise. When the boat pulled away we had a great view of the Manhattan skyline and also went past the Statue of Liberty...not that you can see that view in this pic but it's the first pic of Jeff and I together in years so I picked it instead of the pretty skyline. 

Before we got to any stops we had one full day at sea, which was really nice since we could just relax and not worry about going anywhere and keeping track of kids is infinitely easier on a boat. Our first stop was Halifax in Canada. The weather was fairly cool and a little drizzly but not as bad as I had been worried about for Canada in October - we actually couldn't have asked for better the whole week long. Now a disclaimed about our lack of activities in the ports....since I spent the entire summer trying to deal with the drama that of moving and selling our house (FYI...we moved) and then once we moved had to deal with getting a new floor put in and the chaos that entailed I had approximately three days to get ready for the trip. Thank goodness the flights and hotels were booked long ago. There was so much to do that planning things in the ports didn't make the cut. So we mostly just walked around (more walking!) and saw what was there. Anyways, Halifax was not super exciting but we did walk by one guy who had about 100 birds around him eating birdseed. So my dad just walked up to him and asked if the kids could come over too. They thought it was awesome...Dayton and Ellie knelt down on the ground and put some birdseed in their hands and the birds came right up to them.

The next day was St. John's Bay, also in Canada. The big attraction here was called the reversing falls, which sounded really cool but was actually not that big a deal in person. There's a place where the river runs into some other body of water and the current actually turns backwards for a little bit. But it really just looks like anywhere else you see water swirling around rocks underwater. Except supposedly there's nothing underneath to make the water do it but you can't tell anything special just by looking at it.

We happened to meet up with Chris and Holly's family before we trekked over to the falls and the kids had fun on this giant moose statue.

Thank goodness for teenage cousins! They made the 2+ mile walk to the falls way better for my back. Plus the kids had fun hanging out with all of them so they didn't remember to whine as much about all the walking when they weren't being carried.

One of my favorite things about cruises is that the ships always have a fun little kids club. The kids never really went during the day but they always went right after dinner and stayed until 10:30 when the club closed. One night was pirate night and the kids all dressed up and went marching around the boat chanting pirate things.

Duncan was fairly embarrassed, clearly too old for this kind of thing.

Dayton and Tucker were cool with it though.

And cutie pie Ellie was totally thrilled.

I don't remember what themed night this was from, but Dayton got great face paint for it!

There were a couple of days when the weather was nice enough that we could have breakfast outside on the deck - those were my favorites! 

Next stop was Bar Harbor, Maine. I like the small cities so much better for many reasons, one of them being that the boat doesn't pull right up to the docks - instead it parks(?) a little ways away and then we take tender boats in. Bar Harbor was completely gorgeous! One thing we had actually planned to do was take a trolley tour of Acadia National Park (my mom and dad found out about it and we liked the thought so no planning was required on my part) but thanks to the idiotic government shutdown it was closed....more on that later. So Jeff got himself some good seafood - best meal of his life he said - while I walked around the little shops and found cute little stuff lobsters for Tucker and Ellie for cheap. Later on we met up with everyone and found an ice cream store that was doing 99 cent scoops. I thought why not, it's a good price and then I discovered what an amazing deal it actually was. Turns out it was the super delicious, old fashioned kind of ice cream that no one really makes anymore. Seriously the best ice cream I've ever had. Everyone got double scoops and then we went across the street to a little park to eat them. I wish I had gotten a picture of the kids with their cones - Ellie's was as big as her head.

There is a little island off the mainland that's connected by a sandbar but it's only available at low tide around 8 in the morning or 8 at night. Otherwise it's about 12 feet underwater. So we couldn't get over there but it was still nice to look at. And the kids had a great time playing on the little beach.

My brother Chris and two of his kids kept trying to convince Dayton to walk out into the ocean for money. They told him they'd give him a dollar if we walked up to the top of his shorts. So Dayton thinks sure thing and hiked his shorts up as high as they would go. But their offer was only good for if he went in and actually got his shorts wet up to the top. He was so ticked off that they wouldn't pay him.

Boston was the place that I was most looking forward to and that also was the biggest disappointment. It took forever to walk from the port to anywhere good and once we got there things just weren't that exciting. I had thought there would be awesome Revolutionary War all over the place but the stuff that we saw was kind of boring. We walked up to Boston Commons and then followed the Freedom Trail from there. It was a lot of old buildings and very crowded. Lots of field trips going on and lots of big tour groups with guides all dressed up. I'm sure if we had arranged something like that (darn moving!) that we would have enjoyed ourselves a lot more but as it was it wasn't our favorite day.

The British are coming! The British are coming!

Newport, Rhode Island was our next stop. Another place to tender in...we had to make our way around tons and tons of sailboats hanging around. The kids enjoyed climbing on this giant wave outside the little souvenir shops. Actually, they enjoyed climbing on pretty much anything and everything they could. Bryce was always right in there with them.

This was another place that we had a little bit of a plan for...I had seen it on the cruise ship's website and thought it sounded kind of neat. Thankfully Chris and Holly had actually looked into it and knew what to do. It was nice to be all together with everyone even though we definitely did slow them down :)  There is something called the Cliffs Walk that goes around behind all the mansions and it right on the edge of the water way up high on all the rocks. It was amazing.

All the kids except Grace - she was up ahead with Chris and Holly unfortunately.

We took a tour of The Breakers, which was the Vanderbilt's summer home back in the day. It was amazingly huge! It was really nice how they had the tour set up. Everyone got their own headset that played the tour...it told you things about the house and had stories from people that had lived there. They even had a kid version. My kids thought it was great and they did really well. You can just go at your own pace and hear as much or as little as you wanted. Even Ellie was into it - I could see her looking around at things that the recording was talking about. After the tour we went into the 'backyard' and once again the kids all got crazy. I don't know what Ellie was upset about but she was crying about something and refused to get on the pyramid.

The next morning we got off the boat. Since the end of our trip was during Fall Break from school and the break went through Monday we had planned to stay thru the rest of the weekend and go down to Washington, D.C. Little did we know that everyone in Congress would lose their minds and everything would be shut down. But we were there and our flight wasn't until Monday so we kept on with the plan. After we walked from the ports to the rental car place and they brought the van up Charlie got so excited. I think he was thrilled to see something that was familiar to him. The poor kid had been thru so much - we had moved to a new, strange house and after just a few weeks suddenly we were in a strange hotel room and then on a strange boat. They didn't have the right kind of car seats for all the kids there that would have let them all fit in the van (my boys are so short that they still require a booster seat but they didn't have them so they had to use one of the old toddler kinds without the buckles. Poor boys.) so Dayton had to go with my parents in their car for the drive down.  Thankfully it didn't take too long before all the kids were asleep - they were all severely sleep deprived.

So for school this year Duncan had to do a report on a state  - the kids got to list their top three and then they drew numbers for what order they got to choose in and Duncan was so far down that all of the states on his list were taken by the time it was his turn to choose. We were pretty bummed when he was assigned Delaware until we realized that we would drive right past it on our way to DC! See, originally we were going to take the train but apparently their ticket prices work kind of like airline prices where you have to buy way ahead of time. What was going to cost us around $200 when we first looked had jumped up to around $450. So it became cheaper to rent a van and car seats. We didn't change the plan until just a couple of days before we left and at first I was really disappointed b/c a train sounded kind of fun but since we could detour through Delaware it turned out great. We got some really fun pictures for him to put on his display board.

So once again it was late by the time we got to our hotel and DC seemed way scarier at night than NY even though we were in a nice area super close to the National Mall so we decided there was no way we were walking to find a restaurant so we ended up ordering pizza to be delivered. Lame, I know. The next day was Sunday so we found where a ward was meeting and found a bus to take us close. We just stayed for Sacrament even though it would have been kind of funny to stay for Primary since my kids would double their Primary size. After we got back we set out to see what we could from behind barriers....well, all except for Jeff who had managed to leave his prescription sunglasses behind in the minivan when he returned it the night before (along with my bag of Hershey Kisses) so he had to go back there and get them. He met up with us later.

I was so, so, so bummed that all of the Smithsonians were closed. I have always wanted to go there and there's nothing better than free. But alas, all we could do was check out the cool building.

Here's my mom with the kids at the Washington Monument which along with being closed off from the shutdown was also covered in scaffolding for repairs.

And here's the White House. After we were done for the day we heard from my brother that there were much better photo ops on the other side. Oops.

Sunday was cool and cloudy but it was still pretty crowded, even with stuff being closed. But Monday was beautiful! And things were almost empty so as we walked by the Mall again I made the kids stop for new pictures without all the people in the background at this pretty spot.

One thing that was pretty cool was that there had been a big protest Sunday morning at the WWII memorial and they had knocked down all the barricades so we were able to go all through that one. It was really neat. And all the protesting was over by the time we got there so we had perfect timing. The barricades went back up later. We also saw the Lincoln Memorial but you had to stay so far back that you can't actually see Lincoln in any of the pics I took - just a brown square in the distance. Grr.

Our flight home left in the early evening and we were flying out of Baltimore. So we had it all planned out that we were going to take something called the Mark train from DC to Baltimore which runs all day and is really cheap. Only to find out once we got to Union Station that the Mark trains weren't running for COLUMBUS DAY of all things. Seriously? So we had to pay last minute Amtrak ticket prices (remember from earlier when I talked about train prices?) which was approximately five times more expensive than we had planned for. Plus we had to wait for the next time which was getting us to the airport dangerously close to our flight time. We were really worried that we were going to miss our flight. But luckily we got seats right by the doors on the train and caught the first shuttle to the airport and there was hardly any wait at check-in and security. Thank goodness! Poor Charlie was so exhausted by the time the flight left that he screamed his head off for about fifteen minutes before finally succumbing and going to sleep. Sorry to everyone on the plane with us. The rest of the kids did fine even though I wanted all of them to rest but at least they were quiet. We had another layover in Denver which we would have missed since our original flight took off late because they had to refill the bathrooms with water but for some reason just about all of the connecting flights coming into Denver from various places were late so they waited for everyone. Charlie miraculously stayed asleep on Jeff through switching planes and didn't wake up until we got off the plane in SLC. Everyone else fell asleep immediately...Tucker actually conked out while we were waiting in the airport. By the time we got home it was past midnight which felt like 2 in the morning to us. We were beyond exhausted. This trip was so fun but so, so, so tiring. Jeff swears his legs still hurt.

Thank you Mom and Dad!!!