Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

New York

Surprised by New York (part 1)

Last weekend (the third one in October), our family took an overnight/day trip to New York City. I ended up with so many thoughts and stories about our time that I broke it up into three parts so if you read this, you won’t feel overwhelmed by it all. If you want to read it all in one shot, come back in three days.

For now: the backstory.

It started months ago, when a comedy trio from Ireland that my husband follows online announced a U.S. tour with stops in Philadelphia and New York City. He had some money left from Christmas to spend, so he bought two tickets. For the show in Times Square.

When he told me this, I began to panic. Philadelphia is right there and Times Square is over there. How in the world were we going to see a show in Times Square on a Saturday night in October? I listed all the reasons it wasn’t going to work, and I freaked out numerous times trying to think through a plan for the kids. How much did hotels cost in New York? Would we hire a babysitter to stay overnight at our house? Try to find someone to keep our kids for a night at their house? Did I even want to do this?

Technically, it would be a date night but the logistics were overwhelming. Date nights take work no matter where they happen for us, and this one seemed especially hard to plan.

So I ignored it for months.

I waited until my surgery was on the calendar before even attempting to start thinking about how we could do this. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t be recovering from surgery when our trip was planned.

I should mention that our family has never been to New York City. Not to explore. I mean, we’ve been to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (technically New Jersey?) when the kids were too young to remember. (FYI: I just re-read that post from 9 years ago and cringed. Grace for the people we used to be.)

Exhibit A: What our family looked like the first time we saw the Statue of Liberty.

We’ve picked up family at LaGuardia. And Phil and I went to a Mets-Cubs game one time. I don’t really count those as visiting New York, though. Having lived in Pennsylvania 11 years, not visiting New York City feels like a crime.

One night, as Phil and I were tossing around ideas about New York, he said something like, “It’s too bad we couldn’t take the kids and have a family day on Sunday in New York.” Take the kids! I latched onto that idea almost immediately. It seemed like the perfect solution to my worries. Surely we knew someone who could hang out with our kids for a couple of hours in New York while we were at the show. My husband was surprised that I was pursuing this idea. He hadn’t necessarily meant it seriously.

I, however, was certain it was possible.

So, I went to my online network and asked: 1. Am I crazy to think that this is possible? and 2. Did anyone know anyone who could help? Almost immediately, a name was recommended by several people and this friend was enthusiastic and willing to meet us in the city and hang out with my kids, even though none of us had met in person. (I’m going to pause here because yes, this sounds weird. Bu this friend and I are connected through a group of women who have been sharing, supporting and encouraging each other online for something like four years. I would trust any of these ladies with my kids and my life, so this was not at all weird to me.)

I breathed a sigh of relief. We had the beginnings of a plan! With the first piece of the puzzle in place, more plans came together. We booked a hotel. We made a list of things we wanted to see. (It was too long.) Our friend helped us plan our sightseeing day, even figuring out what trains we might need to ride from one place to the next.

In the midst of this planning, my husband and I had an argument. Maybe it was more of a disagreement, and I’ll admit that it was primarily my anxiety and stress that caused it. I wanted to put a whole bunch of activities on our to-see list. He wanted us to walk around and take in the city. At the root of the disagreement was this feeling that maybe I wouldn’t like New York. I know tons of people who LOVE it, and I worried that I wouldn’t “get it.” I’m used to trips where we do things, like visit museums or historical sites or national parks. None of that was on our plan. (Actually, some of that was but we quickly realized we couldn’t accomplish all of it in one week, much less one day.)

As we took a realistic look at our time in the city, we whittled the list down to just a couple of sights to see, and as our trip approached, my excitement grew. Some of the stress transferred to Phil as he planned our food stops because the other thing we like to do when we visit a new place is eat local.

In my mind, it was all coming together beautifully.

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

A few days before our trip, the friend who was going to meet us messaged me and said she hadn’t been feeling well. She wanted to let me know that it was possible she couldn’t meet us but that she was going to work to find us a backup among her friends. I still trusted that this was going to work out but my anxiety was increasing. The night before our trip, she was still not feeling well and still looking for a backup. I didn’t sleep much that night as I tried to work a solution. I had one more option, and as soon as I woke and it was a reasonable hour, I set to work finding a backup companion for our kids when I should have been packing and doing laundry.

Early in our planning, when I was trying to figure out what our kids would do in Times Square while we were at the show, I messaged my brother who travels a lot and has good recommendations for things to do/see/eat. Also, his wife’s family lives in New York City. During these discussions, his wife’s parents made an offer to help show us around New York while we were there. We weren’t sure we were ready to take it at that time, but when the Saturday morning of our trip arrived and we had a snag in our childcare plan, I knew exactly who to contact. My brother put me in touch with his mother-in-law and what ensued was a flurry of text messages over the next several hours.

I did not ask her directly to watch my kids on short notice. I only wondered if they would know of anyone who could.

So my first surprise of New York was an enthusiastic offer to hang out with my kids for a couple of hours from a woman I have only met once at a wedding celebration years ago but who loves my brother and considers us all family.

It was a relief in so many ways. We made a plan to meet later that night, and I set out to finish the packing and try to get the house in some sort of order.

Her generous offer would not be the only surprise New York had to offer.

To be continued …

We needed this

Our vacation ended nearly two weeks ago, and I’ve been struggling with how to tell you about all that we experienced while we were there. I started with food because that was easy. I don’t want the rest of it to be like someone whipping out their vacation slideshow at a family get-together and then you’re held captive (not in a good way) for the next hour. I suppose that’s not possible here anyway because you can just click away.

I am going to show you pictures, mostly of us, not just of the things we saw. Because I want you to see us as we experienced vacation. We needed this trip after several stressful months, wrapping up the end of the school year and dealing with the tree that fell on our car and other events that had our emotions on a roller coaster.

So, here goes.

Look how tired we are at the start of vacation. We left after Phil got off work for the day, it was around five o’clock, I think by the time we were officially on the road, and I’d been stressing for days about whether I’d packed all the things we needed while imagining bad things happening to the rental car we were taking with us.

BUT THEN New York! After hours of driving north through Pennsylvania, we finally crossed the state border and were immediately rewarded with mountainous views. (Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you’re really on vacation until you’re in another state.) We spent more time than planned at this welcome center, partly because a family was trying to take portrait shots with this sign. The “I <3 New York” isn’t just a clever slogan, as we would find out. For me at least, it was love at first sight.

This is us after a mediocre night’s sleep in a hotel near the Erie Canal and an early wake-up to catch the trolley to the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Baseball is energizing for us, plus we were riding an actual trolley not just a shuttle bus that called itself a trolley.

We will proudly wear our Cubs’ gear anywhere, but it seemed especially appropriate at the Hall of Fame. One neat feature we discovered while waiting for the museum to open was a listing of the current standings, updated daily.  “We’re Number One!”

Our son selectively wants to be in pictures, so when he says “take a picture of me!” we usually comply. Before we left Cooperstown, we wandered down to the water because the Susquehanna River starts here (and we live in the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania). I don’t know if we ever found THE spot, but it was still fun to be at the source.

This is Monday morning, for those of you keeping score at home. We checked in to our cabin in the Finger Lakes on Sunday night and went to the grocery store Monday morning, to settle in for the week ahead. But we still wanted to do some exploring, so we drove south to Watkins Glen State Park. It was about an hour drive and you can see what happened on the way there. Usually, this is our sign of a successful vacation, when both of our kids are passed out in the backseat. Phil and I had to laugh because it was only our second full day of vacation!

It was raining, and not lightly, but we hiked the gorge trail anyway. There weren’t a lot of people out and about, which maybe was a good thing, but one woman offered to take a family picture for us. I think she’d done this before because she crouched down and lined everything up so that we were in the picture with a waterfall. It was not the only act of kindness we experienced on vacation. (More about that in another post.)

A word about these pictures. It has been a long time since I have looked at pictures of myself and not cringed. And I say this not just because my body has undergone some positive changes. It’s a reflection of internal work, too. When I look at the woman in these photos, I see genuine joy and a zest for life. Of course I don’t feel this 100 percent of every day, but more often than not. It’s the result of a lot of hard work. But also, water and nature are two of my happy places.

Windy, much? Between historical sites on Tuesday we ate lunch at a park on another one of the Finger Lakes. (We think we visited three of the lakes altogether, and definitely the two biggest ones, but you could spend weeks in the Finger Lakes and not see everything!) The water draws me and I make no apologies.

Our kids getting sworn in as junior rangers at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. They “solved” a mystery to earn their junior ranger badges. I need to pause here and tell you about our visit to the birthplace of the women’s rights movement. Going in, I thought this was about women winning the right to vote. It was so much more than that, and votes isn’t how it started out at all. This was a movement about giving women options outside of marriage and motherhood, about giving them personhood apart from their husbands. I nearly wept as I sat in the pews of the building where the first convention was held, thinking about the work these women had put into this fight and how we are still fighting for equality today. I was moved by the significance of what they had done for without their convictions, I would have a very different life today. And I was shocked to learn that some of the events toward equality have happened in my lifetime.

That is the long way of saying, if you have the chance to visit Seneca Falls, N.Y., do it and go to the Women’s Rights park.

We are at the top of an observation deck in a wildlife refuge, and this picture was taken as quickly as possible so I could go back down. I have a complicated relationship with heights. I hate to miss out on breathtaking views, but I also have a legitimate fear of falling. I did go up a second time so my husband could show me some nesting birds through the long-range viewfinders.

Another day, another waterfall. If we’d had more Internet access, I would have tagged our vacation #allthefalls because that was a theme. This was Taughhannock Falls, on our way to Ithaca. We didn’t find the overlook we were looking for, but we hiked a bit of a gorge trail. (That was another potential hashtag #GORGEous. I’m clever and I know it!)

Our last night at the cabin, chillin’ by the campfire. There was a lot of togetherness on this vacation. I mean, what family vacation isn’t there togetherness, but we shared a one-room cabin for five days and we all survived. I’m doing my best to cherish my kids at this age because they still mostly like us and still need us a little bit. I know we’re in for some rough days in the future when spending time with family won’t always be fun. For now, we take selfies because we like each other.

Friday morning, it was time to clean out the cabin and pack the car for our next leg of the adventure. Cabin 14 will always have a special place in our hearts.

Niagara Falls. American side. I don’t have enough words for all the feelings. I was much younger the last time I visited the falls, probably about the age of my kids. I don’t remember much about it. I hope they have more lasting memories.

I’m not sure what compelled me to take this picture except that sometimes I’m standing next to my husband and I just want to take a selfie. Plus, I love this jacket I bought before the trip. It has intentional tears in it and was on clearance. I don’t know what to think about who I’ve become.

We weren’t planning to pay for a lot in Niagara because it was the end of our trip and we would be eating out at every meal, but Journey Behind the Falls is worth spending the money on.

This is me having the time of my life. The horseshoe falls was *this close* and I got drenched and it was the best. One of my favorite parts of the trip. Ordinarily, I don’t like getting wet like when it’s raining or if I step in a spot of water while wearing socks. This was not ordinary circumstances, though. We could have spent a lot of time behind and next to the falls. So much history to learn.

We could have spent a lot more time in the tunnels. Definitely a highlight for me. And we got to keep the ponchos as souvenirs.

Whether it’s this summer or another season of year, I hope you take the time you need to slow down, relax and refresh.