This morning started off with an early morning wakeup call, and then a camping neighbor coming over to tell us our kids were being too loud. I stopped over at their campsite a little later and apologized again. We ended up having a lovely conversation with them and their 2 kids. We spent most of the morning talking with them and exchanged phone numbers and emails!
After a quick stop at Walmart, with all of us wearing our matching patriotic shirts, we headed towards New Jersey.
It was especially cool to cross the bridge and see the empire state building and the statue of liberty in the distance. Interesting to me, is that in Utah we see the mountainous view and feel at home, for these people, I’m sure it’s the tall buildings.
We planned to camp at the Liberty Harbor RV Campground in New Jersey. From there, we’d be able to see the Statue of Liberty, and watch the fireworks directly over her. When we got there though, we found out that the fireworks were planned for a different location. We tried to catch the ferry so that we could get closer to the Statue, but they shut it down earlier for 4th of July, and we missed the last one by 10 minutes.
My husband does a lot of work over on the East Coast, and though he’s told me a lot about it, he was anxious to show us some of the sights. So we took us for our next adventure… the Light Rail (PATH) and the Subway. Both I’d never done.
I’ve always wanted to visit Central Park. That was our destination…. and we made it!
I also enjoyed my first New York hot dog and cheese pretzel, courtesy of my parents in law, paying for our special meal (Thanks mom and dad!)
We didn’t stay too long, because we were anxious to see the fireworks over the pier. Unfortunately, they weren’t scheduled to be over the Statue of Liberty this year, so we went to a different pier to watch them. Unfortunately, we were obviously not in the right spot, and a ton of tall buildings were in the way, so we headed back to our campground.
Though our campground was perfect for getting us to all the sights we wanted to see, it wasn’t really meant to be set up for tents. My husband tried unsuccessfully to set up our tent on the 3 inches of gravel over asphalt, and we ended up deciding to sleep under the stars! That was fun- and cooler, it’s been so hot!
It ended up that a few people DID do fireworks on our side of the pier, so we did get to enjoy a few of them. It was definitely a memorable fourth of July. Happy 4th of July everybody!