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The following is a blog of a recent trip my wife and I took with some of our older kids to New York City .

Friday

Dalita, Ali, Nikki, Zach and I and went to the airport. We got a redeye on JetBlue Airlines, a Southwest-like airline that flys up and down the East Coast with a few flights to western cities. It is a nice airline to fly – a TV in every seat and all brand new Airbuses. It only took 4 hours to fly to New York , so, leaving at midnight , we arrived at 6:00 in the morning New York time.

Saturday

After finding a place to put our luggage for the day, we took the subway on the A train into lower Manhattan . We got off and came up out of the subway right next to St. Paul 's cathedral, next to Ground Zero. St. Paul 's is covered with tributes and remembrances to the victims of the September 11 th attacks.

We walked down Fulton Street to the South Seaport Museum and picked up free tickets to the viewing platform that has been built to oversee Ground Zero. We walked back to the platform and made our way to the front. While we were waiting in line, we read the inscriptions made on the walls of the platform. They were covered in flags, in expressions of support, of pictures of lost ones, of expressions of faith.

We finally made our way to be able to see Ground Zero. Most of the debris has been removed and it is mostly a deep pit by now. The crowd was solemn and reverent as they would be at a scared site. It was deeply moving to think of the loss and the tragedy that occurred there.

In digging through the debris, some firemen found a steel truss that had been severed in the shape of a cross. One of the firemen chaplain helped retrieve the steel truss and they have secured it in a concrete base and it towers over the site. It has a white piece of sheet metal wrapped around it, similar to the way some Christians show the cross on Easter with a shroud wrapped over part of it.

We then walked down Broadway past Trinity Church where more tributes were located. We saw the grave of Alexander Hamilton and talked about his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. We continued on down Wall Street and saw the place where George Washington was inaugurated and walked past the New York Stock Exchange down to Battery Park.

In the Peace Gardens of Battery Park, they have put the Sphere of Peace that once stood in the fountains in front of the World Trade Center . The Sphere has been damaged by falling debris and has been badly damaged, but is still intact. The sign in front states that like the sphere, peace has been damaged by the attacked but can still endure.

Battery Park was beautiful – everything was in bloom. The flowers were vibrant and the trees were all in bloom. We took some pictures in front of the blossoming trees.

We made our way to midtown, where we ate lunch at Al's Soup Kitchen, made famous on Seinfeld as the Soup Nazi. Zagats states the following:

Immortalized on Seinfeld for his "amazingly hearty soups" and short fuse, Al Yeganeh "ladles on" at this Midtown "hole-in-the-wall"; so as not to annoy Al, regulars "practice their orders" while standing in line.

We practiced our orders and unlike on the TV show, Al was surprisingly nice and gave Zach some free chocolates and recommended certain soups that we might like. The soups were excellent. We walked down through Times Square and went to 42 nd Street and went to see the Lion King play on Broadway. It was a fun performance and they had great dancing, singing and costumes.

After the show, we walked over to Rockefeller Center . On the way, we passed some street artists and we stopped and gave them photos of Mica and Savannah to draw charcoal portraits of. We had portraits of Ali, Nikki, and Zach done when were in New York in 1999, so we thought it would be nice to have portraits of these two done.

When we got to Rockefeller Center , we rented some ice skates and the five of us went ice skating. It had been a dream of Ali's for years to ice skate there. We dazzled them with our finesse and skill and left with only a few bruises and sore bottoms. We walked back to Times Square , had some New York Cheese Cake and then went to Ollies, a Chinese restaurant right off of Broadway. Zach was unconscious for most of the meal.

Sunday

We had a nice breakfast at a nice boutique hotel in New York that we stayed at and then took a taxi into downtown Manhattan . We bought our tickets to Ellis Island at Castle Clinton, an old fort in Battery Park that used to be called Castle Gardens . We had several of our relatives come through Castle Gardens, as it was the immigration point before the facilities at Ellis Island was built. We took the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty Island. Nikki and I quickly ran to the place she had taken a picture of the New York skyline in 1999 and in the center of that skyline had been the Twin Towers . She took a new photo in the exact same spot so she can show the change in the skyline.

We hopped back on the same ferry and went to Ellis Island . We went through some interesting exhibits that showed the process there. If they wrote an E on your lapel, then a doctor would need to check your eyes and if he didn't approve, you might not make it through. We went to a short live play where a modern day mom and daughter were moving and found a bunch of old letters from her grandmother who had come from Russia with her mother and showed their experience in the migration and the passage across the ocean and the experience of Ellis Island . It was very well done and gave us a sense of what they might of experienced.

We finally made it back to Battery Park and unfortunately ran into a parade that was closing down a number of the streets and so we had to walk a ways to find a taxi. We did, picked up our luggage at the hotel and made our way to the airport, where we flew Jet Blue back home and arrived home about 1:00 am in the morning, ready for school and work the next day.