A Day of Travel

Wednesday morning we did some laundry, packed up, and hit the road for Buffalo where we would catch the Amtrak to New York City.  This is a shot of our hotel in Palmyra.

Well, we almost hit the road.  First we took a quick detour to walk around the Palmyra Temple.

It is one of the smaller temples, and is situated just up the hill from the Smith farm and the sacred grove.

This is a view of the sacred grove from the temple grounds.  My step-sister Kathy had alerted us to watch for the circle-inside-a-square motif (which you can see on the fencing).  It was found on the walkways, on the temple and in the fence.  She interpreted the symbolism as the circle representing our eternal nature, and the square to be a symbol of this earth - the four corners of the earth.  Here we are, eternal beings, having a mortal experience on the earth.  I was so glad she pointed this out before we saw it, it made us look for the symbol more carefully.

And here we are by the temple.

We spent enough time on the temple grounds that we cut it close making the train.  In fact, Dan dropped us at the train station with our tickets and luggage figuring it would be faster for him to turn in our rental car and get back to the train station than it would be for all of us and our luggage.  It was close, but thank goodness he made it. 

We upgraded to business class on the train since it was not that much more (train travel is inexpensive compared to air travel), and we would be occupying these seats for the next 8 hours (ended up being almost 9 hours).  The seats were wide with footrests and oodles of leg room.

As you can see Adam took advantage of the "plenty of legroom" and stretched out.  We were the last car on the train and right next to the snack car which was very convenient.

Dan enjoyed the view from the back of the train since we were the last car.

I think trains are Adam's favorite mode of travel these days.  That is a happy smile.

We were slated to arrive in New York City at Penn Station at 9:30 pm, so we got to enjoy the sun setting over the Hudson River (through the rain-speckled window).

After a few delays we arrived at Penn Station, gathered our luggage, and tried to find the right exit.  We finally located the taxi stand.  Since we were four people with luggage for four, we needed a good-sized taxi.  A family of five ahead of us was in the same predicament.  The taxi stand director (or whatever his title is) proposed our two families go together in a shuttle bus.  Our hotel was on Times Square, so it was not too far away, but it was late, we were tired and we agreed to the deal.  He probably charged us more than we needed to pay - but we were glad to arrive in our room.  When we arrived in the room we were treated with a birds eye view of Times Square.  We spent many hours over the next week watching all the changing billboards and watching the traffic.