Statue of Liberty

Well what do you know about that, I am actually completely caught up as of this post.

Today we went to see the Statue of Liberty. This meant getting up pretty early so that we could leave the hotel between 6:00 and 6:30. Thankfully the traffic wasn't too bad. It was a bit of an adventure once we got into the city. We actually came in through Jersey City, New Jersey. We had to deviate from what the GPS told us, and that took us through downtown Jersey City. When we did get to the station where we got our tickets it was raining as it had been all day. The station is the old train/ferry station that was used to bring immigrants and other passengers in from the ferries and onto trains. It looked very old and the area where the train tracks were is now completely overgrown. Once we had our tickets we had to go through security. The security there is just like airport security. Finally we made it out to the ferry. It was raining/snowing and the wind made it very cold. We waited on the ferry for a few school groups which made it very crowded. But anyway, they took us to Ellis Island first. Here all the school groups got off, but we stayed on in order to beat them and thus the crowds to the Statue of Liberty. When we got there, we had to go through another airport-like security check. At long last we made it to the pedestal of the statue. In here they had the original torch which had to be replaced due to corrosion I believe, but now it's restored. Here is a picture of it.

Then Mom, Jacob, and I headed up to the crown. Crown visitors have to take the stairs (which was fine by me) so we started up the over 300 steps to the crown. Once we got to the top of the pedestal, the stairs turned into a tight spiral staircase. This was very steep, but we got to see the infrastructure of the statue. So here is a picture of what that looked like.

Finally we made it to the crown. The windows would have provided a pretty good view except that it was foggy so we couldn't see much. But we were quite a ways up. There wasn't much space up there, but it wasn't too bad. Here are a couple pictures of that.

Here we are, in the crown of the Statue of Liberty!

Then we started on the stairs down. These seemed much steeper, but we made it safely down. Mom took a picture of the stairs to illustrate how steep it was.

We then went out onto the pedestal looking for Dad and Alyssa who had remained down there and listened to an audio tour of the museum. This picture was taken from the pedestal.

There was a small museum in the pedestal that we walked through pretty quickly for time's sake. But we did get some pictures in there. Two of these are with a full size replica.

We then had to stand out in the wind and rain while we waited for the next ferry. It gave us a new appreciation for what the immigrants went through. Our original plan was to go back to Ellis Island, but we decided that it was just too cold and wet so we went straight back to New Jersey. We made it back to the van, which Dad had forgotten to lock. Thank God (we did!) it was still there with everything in it. We then drove back to the hotel on the right road this time. And that concludes our adventure to the Statue of Liberty.

Quote: "We were actually in the crown of the Statue of Liberty!"