#teamtourist, pt. 4: Brooklyn, Ground Zero, Ft. Wadsworth, and the Empire State Building

Sunday was a pretty glum day--we woke up late, got ready late, and headed into the city late... plus it was raining all day. I suppose that after having a successful trip thus far, it was only a matter of time before we had an off sort of day. But we proceeded, this time with Brooklyn as our destination. We had every intention of going to the Brooklyn Brewery, but due to the trains being delayed by the rain, we didn't make it to Brooklyn until after it had closed. We walked across the street to a vintage clothing store and browsed around for a bit, but left empty-handed to find a bar, and walked into Soft Spot when we saw they had 2-for-1 wells as their special for the evening. We hung around there for a few hours and then decided to go head back to Newark to plan the next few days.

On Monday we took the PATH train to the financial district to check out the World Trade Center area and Ground Zero. It was under construction for the 10th anniversary memorial to open a month later, so there wasn't much to see other than the preview site down the road. It was really crazy following the timeline of how everything happened on that day 10 years ago--and it's really admirable how New Yorkers got through it as well.







Just down the road from Ground Zero is Wall Street, so we decided to walk past the New York Stock Exchange and take in the craziness of the financial district.





We walked down to the water to talk about what we wanted to do for the rest of our trip. As most people would know or guess, New York City is not a cheap trip... so we decided to cut our trip short and leave on Wednesday rather than Friday. We decided that there were two things we had to do while we were still on vacation: go to the Empire State Building at night, and visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The evening was supposed to be clear, so we'd hit the Empire State Building Monday night, and do the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on Tuesday afternoon. In the meantime, though, we thought we'd hop on the free ferry to Staten Island and check out what it had to offer.

We hopped on a bus to go to Fort Wadsworth and take in some history in an otherwise fairly suburban part of New York. We had some trouble finding the fort itself, until we walked out onto the beach and ran into a local who guided us in the right direction.











It was getting late, so we began our venture to mid Manhattan and then to the Empire State Building. I don't have a whole lot to say about the Empire State Building aside from the line was long (but it moved quickly!), and the view was really incredible. It was cold, but it after a pretty hot week in New York I didn't totally mind.







Next: Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and a bit of rural Pennsylvania.