Back in the USA

Mike & I returned to the States earlier this month.  Good friends were getting married outside Baltimore and it was can't miss; a perfect reason to return to our home country and a much better reason than because we're being kicked out of our current one (which will be the reason we return in January).

The cheapest tickets (by at least half) from Europe to the US were out of Brussels into New York City so we turned a weekend trip into an 18 day holiday, adding Brussels, New York City and Amsterdam to what would've been just a Baltimore weekend.

Besides my trip to New York in 2008, we haven't been to NYC since our first visit back in 1999, on our honeymoon road trip from Salt Lake to Belfast, ME.  Perhaps it was the sight of a water fountain (free water) near free public restrooms but, upon arriving into LaGuardia, we knew right away it was nice to be back, both in NYC as well as in the USA.

In our few days in NYC before travelling south to Baltimore, we explored the Upper West Side and Brooklyn, both real contenders for our new address, as well as walking the length of the west side of Manhattan and breadth of Downtown.  We wandered through Washington Square Park, Central Park, Riverside Park, The Highline, Battery Park, and Brooklyn Bridge Park and spent an hour on the (free) Staten Island Ferry.  We toured the Federal Reserve and 9/11 Memorial and saw the Picasso exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison.

If we weren't confident that our relocation to NYC in January was the right move before this trip we definitely are now.  We are really looking forward to calling NYC home.