Two weeks ago, the kids and I embarked on our first real trip in two years. It was our only our second time taking a big trip (on a plane) as a family. Like most people, our travel plans for last summer were waylaid by COVID. So this trip was a big deal. The trip was two months in the making. Under ordinary circumstances, a trip like this would not be a simple undertaking with just one parent and four children. But COVID made it that much more difficult to plan and navigate. Everything had to be researched, pre-booked, and preplanned. Our itinerary was New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. We traveled for a long and at times trying, two weeks.
We ran into many people on our journey who used words like "brave," to describe my undertaking. Perhaps they were right? There were times that I felt more crazy than brave, but either way, we did. We came, we saw, we conquered - Veni Vidi Vici. We grew stronger as a family, negotiating all the challenges that came our way, and had a marvelous adventure. We look forward to sharing it you.
Day One......
Packing for four kids (and one mom who has never been known to pack lightly) is no laughing matter. I started a week (well, if truth be told, it was weeks) in advance and yet we were still up until quite late the night before putting the finishing touches on and triple checking the eight page packing list.
That's 3:16 AM, not PM, and the time we had to get out of bed in order to get to the airport in time to catch our 7 AM flight. I got to bed around midnight and was running on three hours of sleep.
Waking the crew in the wee hours of the morning was no easy feat.
Our car picked us up at 4:30 and we arrived at the airport just as the sun was coming up.
Once we got to the airport and the kids saw the planes everywhere, our long-awaited trip finally felt real.
The kids were great travelers on the plane and complied with all FAA and CDC mandates by keeping their face masks on during both entire flights (from Los Angeles to Washington DC and then on to New York from there. The entire plane seemed to giggle along with them as they squealed and screeched as we took off from LAX.
We came upon this magical fountain of sorts when we landed at La Guardia airport in New York. The kids were mesmerized. We spent so much time watching it that our luggage was removed from the carousel and sent to a special office for safe keeping. Whoops!
It was at this moment that the kids knew we had finally arrived in New York. Now we just had to solve the minor problem of getting transportation into Manhattan - no easy feat for a family of five with a load of luggage in tow. It took nearly 90 minutes to figure out a way to get in to the city, but eventually we figured it out. Challenge number one of 5000 we faced on the trip.
After settling into our hotel, we headed out for some scrumptious New York pizza. It was exactly what we needed after a (very) long day of travel.
As we got ready for bed our first night and gazed out our window, we soon discovered our incredible view of the Chrysler Building in Midtown Manhattan. Each night I sat in our dark room, after the kids fell asleep, mesmerized by its beauty.
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