NYC - last days

One of our last stops was to see the aircraft carrier, Intrepid.  Such a fabled history for this old ship...as we walked toward the ship you could only see the old planes on the upper deck.

As you get closer, you see how huge this beast really is!

There were often over 2500 sailors living on this ship - it's a small city!

On the upper deck we toured some of the historical aircraft that they have on display there.

This one was Madison's favorite - its the jet that was used in Top Gun.

Inside you could actually touch many of the instrument panels and they had retired volunteers that had served on the ship telling you about their time there.

In the anchor room - the size of the chains was pretty impressive!

This was an officer's bunk room.  Very tiny but efficiently laid out.

So this is where my photos ended since we were supposed to fly home the next morning.  That didn't happen.  Our flight was delayed until evening because of bad weather further east so we went back to the Natural History Museum since we hadn't felt like we had enough time there the first day.  By the time we got back to our hotel to get our things to go to the airport, they had cancelled our flight.  Ugh.  

We spent a frantic 2 hours trying to figure out what to do since the soonest Delta could get us home was TWO days later. We ended up taking a train to Newark, NJ where we then took a bus to the airport and rented a car.  This should have been a fairly easy overnight drive back to Detroit but oh no...that bad weather had created all sorts of havoc.  Several times we were routed off and back on to I-80 to avoid accidents on the expressway.  And then finally, somewhere around Mt. Poconos in PA, the X-way was closed and there was no way around it without heading out onto some tiny mountain roads in the dark and snow.  Nope.  We bedded down in the car between all the semi-trucks to wait it out.  

We woke up around 3 am, drove back to the expressway to find it still closed so back to our parking spot for some more snoozing.  At 6 am, with it barely light enough to see, we put our trust in Google Maps and started heading east on back roads.  We were doing pretty good and were ALMOST back to I-80 when the road we were on closed down! Ugh!  We rerouted ourselves to some even smaller back roads and by10:00, we were back on I-80 about 10 miles from where we originally started.

From then on it was pretty clear sailing and we made it back to Detroit by 4:30.  It was an awesome trip, even if it did end with a little more adventure than we had planned!