Shall we continue with the travelogue of our February vacation? I should probably tell you about the very first thing we did on this trip.

We drove to Hartford. Try and contain your excitement over that statement.

Okay, we had an ulterior motive in visiting Hartford. One was a terrific hotel rate. And the other was visiting the Mark Twain House. This is something we had planned to do last summer and we just never got around to it. It was the perfect way to break up our drive to New York City and I’m so glad we went.

It’s a truly amazing location. The outside is brick and the patterns are beautiful. And the inside – well, I don’t have pictures but trust me when I tell you that it’s stunning. It’s warm and inviting and not pretentious at all. The tour we took was full of little anecdotes about Twain’s time while he lived here, about the stories he made up for his children, and about how the house came to be built.

The Visitor’s Center is also terrific. There is a film about Twain (made by Ken Burns so you know it’s good) and lots of his quotes are on the walls.

Of course we had fun taking some photos. Above is Dale posing as Twain. Can I just tell you that he loved the suit? He’s so disappointed that I won’t let him have one.

And here is Dale posing with a statue of Twain made entirely out of Legos. So cool!

We enjoyed our visit immensely and highly recommend this to all of you.

Allow me to close with my favorite Mark Twain quote:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

I teased you a bit on Friday and said we were doing something warm for the weekend. And warm we were at Great Wolf Lodge New England. The purpose of the trip was, ostensibly anyway, the Kiwanis Mid-Winter Conference. However, we did not do much Kiwanis-ing. We did, however, do lots and lots of fun things with a great group of friends.

Like take selfies wearing wolf ears. Yes, everyone gets wolf ears upon check in. They are silly but we all wore them all weekend long.

Of course the big attraction is the water park. Now. I am not generally a fan of this type of place. For one, there are tons of people and a lot of those people are kids. And it’s loud.

But. It’s also warm (84°!) and there are adult beverages and lots of water activities to try.

Like water slides.

And a lazy river and a really big hot tub.

I’m not generally the adventurous type but my friends convinced me to try a couple of those waterslides and let me just say – it was a blast. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time!

And when I wasn’t tubing I was knitting and relaxing and sharing stories with friends. And also drinking adult beverages. I mentioned those, right? The Hurricanes were very fine, I’m just saying.

It was great to just kick back with friends and be silly.

It was a pretty darn perfect weekend.

I’ve been thinking a lot about our trip to New York City and how to tell you about it. We did a lot! I think, though, that I will start by telling you about my favorite thing: The Tenement Museum.

This museum is definitely not a typical museum. There are several different tours you can take, each on various topics regarding life in the tenements of New York. The tour we took was called “Sweatshop Workers” and it involved visiting 3 different apartments in the building on Orchard Street, describing what life was like for the Levine family as they worked creating ladies dresses in their apartment, and discussing the challenges and obstacles they faced living in the most densely populated place in the world. Our tour guide was fantastic and the tour itself was interactive, engaging and enlightening. There are also several other tours, including ones on Shop Life, Hard Times, and Irish Immigrants. They even have walking tours of the neighborhood to partner with tours of the building and on Thursday evenings they have Tastings at the Tenement, an event that includes lots of flavors from the Lower East Side, both past and present. (Side note: I’m totally going back for that one!) There is a fabulous gift shop where we made several purchases, including, as I previously mentioned my awesome new hat. It’s easy to get to, reasonably priced, and I can’t recommend it enough to anyone visiting New York with even a mild interest in history, immigrants and the cultural melting pot.

Let me end this post by saying that my preference, when I tell you about stuff, is to show you photos of the stuff. However, there is no photography allowed in the Tenement Museum so I don’t actually have any photos to show you. What I do have, though, are pictures of the lunch we had after visiting the museum. We were in the Lower East Side and had just spent an hour and a half talking about Jewish immigrants. Where else would we go but Katz’s Deli? And what else would be have but matzo ball soup and pastrami sandwiches?

Truthfully, I could write a whole separate post about Katz’s and the awesome food and atmosphere, the super friendly couple we shared a table with, and the cultural significance of this deli – but I won’t.

I will simply say: go.

You guys! We had such a great vacation! We started in Hartford and visited the Mark Twain Museum and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. And then we moved on to New York City and visited Times Square, Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building, the New York Public Library, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, Central Park, the Tenement Museum, Katz’s Deli, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and many many restaurants and bars.

Truthfully, trying to summarize this is feeling a little overwhelming at the moment. So, for now, here are some shots of the two of us, throughout the week.

Holding hands in Hartford.

On the red steps in Times Square.

And more of Times Square.

At the top of the Empire State Building.

At Heartland Brewery after a very very long wait at the Empire State Building.

At Rockefeller Center. No, we did not skate.

At Katz’s Deli.

At 5 Napkin Burger.

I’ll have much more to say about this trip, no doubt, but I hope you’ll be content with these (mostly) selfies for now.

P.S. It’s good to be home.