All You Wanted to Know About that Trip I Took a Few Months Ago

Five months ago I went on a trip. And I have never felt like I got to do justice to my journey. Whenever I started sharing the good times your eyes glazed over or someone threw something in the toilet and cut the conversation short. But that is the beautiful thing of blogging. I get to share as much as I want and I can't even see if you've fallen asleep and your kids can't interrupt me.


Necessary background info: My youngest sis, to protect her non-blogging identity we will just call her D, lives in a faraway place called New Jersey. My other sis, E, and I knew she was in desperate need of some familial love and decided to visit her out of the goodness of our hearts and a crazy desire to just get out of our houses for a few days. We have very good husbands who knew this meant that it was time to take some vacation days off of work and stay at home with the kids so some good bonding could be had all over the place.

Necessary background info deux: E and I had taken a similar trip a couple years earlier to visit D. The timing happened to work in my favor since D and E were prego on both trips and therefore slightly ornery making me seem even more patient and easygoing than usual. This also meant they are larger in pictures than their vanity would like them to be. But let us move on to the highlights:

E and I on the front row of the Regis and Kelly show! I don't know why I have a horse mouth, but maybe it was due to the fact that we had just come in on the red-eye and I can't sleep on a plane--making my photogenic reflexes way off. Also, I was next to a large man who was drinking liquor the entire flight. Mix that with his overpowering garlic breath and I'm amazed I didn't need the doggy bag for relief. I was nice enough to let E have the window seat since she was the one great with child. And it is just smart to let your hormonal traveling mate have those little luxuries.

We pretended like we use mass transit all the time and rode the subway to Chinatown where I haggled myself some souvenirs. The picture doesn't show it well but there was a rat on the tracks. That was very exciting. We don't get rats on Trax in SLC, do we?

You can't visit NY without going to Times Square. Now we've done this a couple of times and maybe we can change the rule to 'If you've done Times Square once that's enough'.




Next up was a jaunt to Hershey, PA. E did a report on it in 5th grade and ever since felt like she was the chocolate expert in the family. Chocolate World was a fun place and it did truly smell great there. This is D and her lovely fam holding up the world's largest candy bar.

While in PA, we visited some Amish country. I feel like the Mormons and the Amish are very similar in certain ways. Only Mormons get to dress better. This is me and my cute nephew getting some loves in front of a buggy. If the picture was a little closer you could see the rapture on his face as he is getting squeezed by his favorite aunt.




We also spent some time at Princeton University where I pretended for a minute that I was smart enough to go there. D's hubby is Smart and he works in the chemistry lab. He gave us a tour and tried to explain what he does and we tried to pretend like we had any idea what he was talking about. It was a beautiful campus and there was a sense of history that you don't get on our campuses out west.

This last picture is of our layover at the Phoenix Airport on the return trip. We were very glad to make it there as there was a slight miscommunication about our travelling arrangements. We had flown in to JFK but were returning home from Philadelphia and somehow that nugget of info didn't get processed. Something about the East coast and no mountains to tell me which way is west makes my sense of direction kaput and I didn't realize D and her hub were taking us to JFK for our return flight. We had a panic attack of being in the completely wrong state with our actual flight being due to take off in 45 minutes.....Thankfully D married a man who is not only very Smart but also drives very Fast. We miraculously made it onto our flight with seconds to spare. The downer (besides all that and ending up in the wrong gate) was that I got some Hershey's syrup and Amish jam confiscated but that is for a different post about the NTSB and their stupid rules.





That was the bullet version of the trip. More good times were had and D and E didn't even complain about their huge bellies very often. D and her fam took very good care of us and even had treats and fine food awaiting us. I highly recommend visiting sisters who live far away. Thanks for listening. Now that I got that off my chest I am feeling a little robbed that I never got to tell anyone about the trip to Yellowstone I went on when I was 10....