Kaitlin and Emily do New York: 9 March 2009.

Emily and I were both out of bed by 4 and on the road by 5:30. Her grandma fed us breakfast and sent us off with snacks. It was still dark out, so as we drove, things slowly got lighter and lighter.

Emily has an excellent taste in music, and she compiled the perfect mixes for our trip. When she asked me if I had heard of Oren Lavie and then proceeded to play "Her Morning Elegance," I knew that we were going to have a magical time.

Some of that magic involved driving through Virginia, Washington D.C., Delaware, Maryland, and New York in seven hours. That's Baltimore, above.

Who would have thought you could go to so many places in so little time?

We reached New York City by 12:30 pm. We had originally planned on only one day in New York, but since we got there early, we thought we'd spent an afternoon there on our own.

So we drove over the Washington Bridge, giddy, frankly, that we were there and that we were doing it!

I had relieved Emily halfway through our drive, and so I got to experience firsthand New York driving, which was so great. Everyone drives like an idiot, which means you can drive like an idiot and no one cares! We actually found a parking spot fairly easily and I parallel parked for the first time. Ha. It was a good thing Em's car is nice and small.

We grabbed sandwiches at a deli and ate them as we walked through the city to find Central Park, still not quite believing that we were there.

We were trying to find the Met, but we stumbled across a castle first.

We also found a random statue.

It was cold and cloudy, of course, but it meant the lighting was perfect for picture-taking.

There was a tunnel with a class of elementary-school kids walking through it and I wished briefly that I could have been an elementary school kid who took field trips to Central Park.

We quickly discovered that the Met was closed on Mondays, so I called Angelica and asked her to look up the address of the restaurant that they used for the outside shots on Seinfeld. It turned out that it wasn't too far from where we were, so we drove up, and amazingly found another parking spot, and this time Emily parallel parked for the first time.

And then right down the block was this magnificent cathedral, St. John the Divine, and so we decided to go exploring.

Inside we were awed by how large the space was. An orchestra played softly at the front, echoing off the vast walls.



The rose window glowed marvelously from the inside.



The cathedral was created as a "unifying center of intellectual light," and it housed areas devoted to the arts.



I found lots of familiar names.



Afterward we wandered around some more and got coffee and muffins at a fun little shop.



And then we made our way back to the car and drove back into Jersey to spend the night at her friend's house.