Manhattan, NY (January 9, 2015)

Our daughter was feeling much better the following morning, so our trip home should be good. We had breakfast at the hotel, and packed our belongings for the trip home. We would be traveling for most of the day, so we decided to pick up some food on our way to Penn Station. The girls found a little place called Sergimmo Salumeria that sounded delicious, so we walked a little bit out of our way to swing by and pick up some sandwiches for the ride. Our youngest daughter ordered a salami sandwich and our oldest daughter and I both had prosciutto. This was a true New York Deli. I had to watch other people to figure out how to order, and then I had to watch again to figure out how to pick up our order and pay. It was a very crowded, fast paced little deli, but I did it, and we had lunch; a big accomplishment.

Now off to Penn Station. As we walked into Penn Station, it looked very different than when we were there last. There was a big electronic board in the middle of the station (I’m sure it was here last time, but we sure didn’t notice it), and hundreds of people just standing around (they were definitely not here last time). We looked at the electronic board, thinking it would tell us how to get to the Newark airport, but for all we knew, it could have been in some other language. We had no idea how to read the board. 

Everything was so abbreviated, that we couldn't figure it out

We finally found a wonderful Amtrak employee who told us how to read the board, but she spoke with such a thick accent that we weren’t sure she was speaking English, and we definitely still weren’t sure how to read the board. 

So we went over and studied the board for a few minutes, and finally figured out which train would be ours. About 10 minutes before our trains arrival the track number appeared on the board. Our train would arrive at gate 7E. Now we knew exactly what we were doing. We looked like pros. We headed over to the sign for gate 7E, but when we got there, it felt like we were in the Harry Potter books trying to get to platform 9 ½. Gate 7E had one escalator, and it was coming up toward us, full of people. There had to be a down escalator somewhere and we were going to find it. We kept looking around, but there was no down escalator. And when we asked people where the down escalator was, they looked at us like we were crazy.   How were we supposed to get to our train? Finally, as we started to panic, thinking we were going to miss our train, a little bell sounded, and the escalator switched directions and started going down. We had never in our lives seen such a thing. Now as I’ve said before, there is a lot of open space in Colorado, so we have big hotels, and we have escalators that go up and down next to each other. We had never imagined that they would just reverse the escalator; what an ingenious idea! When you send small town girls to the big city, they are intrigued by the simplest of things! 

We got on our train, and experienced the most amazing sandwiches we have ever eaten. If I had known how good these were going to be, I would have ordered enough for a week. We will definitely go back to the salumeria if we are ever in New York City again. When the conductor came around, she checked our tickets and returned them to us. Since I had explained to the girls about the round trip tickets on our way into the city, I didn’t think I needed to explain it again, so I didn’t, but I probably should have. It was only by chance that they brought their tickets off the train with them. They had completely forgotten that they needed them for the air train. We took the air train all the way to the concourse for our gate, and went through security there. None of us remember the flight home; we had too many great memories going through our minds. The moral of this story…We Loved New York City! What an incredible experience for three small town girls.