Allentown, PA

We arrived home from Minnesota on a Tuesday evening, and three days later, on Friday, we packed up the car and made the 9 hour (12 hours in our case) drive to Allentown, PA, to spend a few days (which stretched into a week and a half) with Ben's brother Chris and his family. I don't have as many pictures as I would have liked, but we sure had a ton of fun. It was a jam packed visit, full of day trips here and there. Here's a quick run down:

Saturday :
After packing a picnic lunch, we made the two hour drive to Hershey, PA, to spend the day at Chocolate World. We took the trolley ride around Hershey, listened to story of Milton Hershey and got to see all the town's historical sites. Milton Hershey was a really cool guy, he helped lots of kids over the course of his life. We have a lot of respect for him. After our trolley ride, we were on to a chocolate tasting "class", where we all about different flavors of chocolate. It was delicious, needless to say. Then we saw a 3-D movie... it was silly, I can't really remember what it was about. Honestly, our favorite part of the whole day was probably the free "tour" of the chocolate factory. It was a neat little ride that went through all of the steps to making Hershey chocolate. We finished off the day with dinner at Red Robin and arrived home late that night.

Sunday:
Ben and Chris had tickets to the NASCAR race at Pocono Raceway (the race was called due to rain, and the ended up going back the next day). Anya, the kids and I spent the afternoon at Chuckee Cheese.

Monday:
While the boys were at the NASCAR race, Anya and I took Kaiy, Kate and Josh to Sesame Street World. It was a huge amusement park just for kiddos. It was mostly water rides, which was nice since it was such a hot day. Katelyn was braving than I have ever seen her. She rode on a roller coaster and the ride that takes you straight up and then drops. She did great and loved both of them!

Tuesday:
With Ben back in tow, we headed to the Crayola Factory for the day. It was really neat. They had craft stations set up over an entire floor. We got to paint a ceramic turtle, play with model magic, do some painting and of course some coloring. I think this was one of my top three stops on our vacation.

Wednesday:

This was by far our busiest day, and the coolest. After driving an hour to New Jersey, we parked the car at Summit Station and took an hour long train ride right into the heart of New York City. Our train let off right near Times Square and we walked from Times Square to Central Park over the course of the day. Our first stop was John's Pizzeria for some fantastic pepperoni pizza. It took as a while to find it, thank goodness Ben had my dad's GPS in his pocket. From there we headed over to Times Square. It was neat. Everything was so crazy busy, it was kind of hard to take it all in. Toys'R'Us is right there in the heart of Times Square, so we took the kids in for a look around. Our next big stop was Saint Patrick's Cathedral. It was beautiful, I really have no words. Then we walked down to Rockefeller Center and bought tickets to go to the "Top of the Rock". We stayed up there for nearly and hour taking in the whole city, it was awesome. We all sat down inside and just took it all in. After St. Patrick's we headed down 5th Avenue to Central Park. The plan was to take the kids to FAO Schwartz but it was already closed. Luckily, the brand new Apple store was right there, so we took the elevator down and spent some time playing with all the cool electronics. By this point, we were pretty exhausted. We had made it Central Park, but we were too tired to walk through it, so we decided to take the carriage ride through Central Park. It was my favorite part of the day. From there, we took the Subway back to the train station, ate some McDonald's, and quickly caught our train back to Summit Station. It was a whirlwind day, but we are sure glad we did it!

Thursday - Monday:
These days are kind of a blur! We were supposed to drive home on Thursday, but after all of our day trips the previous days, we were ready to just chill out, so we did. I think we went to Chuck E. Cheese again and rented some movies, but mostly we just hung out. One afternoon, Anya and I took the girls to an awesome outdoor mall that had a sweet slash pad for them to play on. It was very fun.

 

 

 

Ben and Chris got NASCAR ticket for Watkins Glen and spent Sunday and Monday driving back and forth to the race (It was rained out on Sunday! Two for two!)

Tuesday, we finally packed up and headed home. We had a great trip and made some WONDERFUL memories. Thanks for putting up with us for so long, Chris and Anya!

(I wish I had more pictures, but I forgot my camera on several of our day trips!)