Well, some of you started asking if I was still alive up here in (not always so) sunny Long Valley.. I’m glad to announce I am 
Last week, Laurens’ family came to visit us. It was nice to see some real Belgians again! They came over to the house, tasted Martine’s delicious brownies, and discovered the great place that we call Applebee’s! Laurens decided to spend the rest of his weekend with his family in New York, and left Elke and me alone at the house (can you imagine? No one here to kill the spiders in our bathroom, no one to assist as a personal shopper,…)
Well, actually we managed quite well without him! We immediately converted his room to private cinema, so we could spend our man-less evenings watching the Lord of the Rings trilogies. We even managed to do quite a lot of work when he was gone !
Friday, we went on a futile shopping tour to find the iPhone for Elke’s brother, but as you can expect : the thing is nowhere to be found, except in some shady shops, for quite a price!
Saturday we decided to do some New York exploring on our own. The trip started of very well when we found out that MapQuest was sending us the wrong way. Luckily we already know the route to our favorite city by heart, so we arrived nicely on schedule at the ferries. Too bad the weather wasn’t that great, because usually you have a great view over the NY skyline. It created the perfect atmosphere for a trip to Ground Zero. Too bad you couldn’t see much of the place. Everything is hidden behind walls and fences. We also visited St Paul’s Chapel, the place where a lot of WTC memorials are kept. Afterwards we took a tour in downtown NY, visited Wall Street, the US customs House, the Wall Street Bull, NY Stock Exchange.. some other great buildings I forgot the name of, and finally ended up at a Romanian street festival to have lunch!
Then, we made way for Pier 17, better known as South Street Seaport. The place has a really nice atmosphere, and there are a lot of artists performing there. Definitely worth the visit! (especially if you’re an Abercrombie & Fitch freak who is not crazy enough to go shopping on 5th Avenue!) On Pier 17, you had a nice overview of the Brooklyn bridge, so we decided to walk that one too, but somewhere on the middle of the bridge, we decided that it was going to take us too long to cross over and turn back, so we headed back to the city. The sky was clearing up, and we tried to visit the statue of liberty, but were already too late to purchase tickets. While resting a bit at the most southern place of Manhattan, we all of the sudden had the crazy idea to walk all the way up to central Park, just for the sake of it. It’s a bit more than 8 kilometers (that’s without all the detours we took), and it took us about four hours to get all the way up there. (this may sound as a very long time, but there were a lot of shoe stores on that street! Add about 70 traffic lights, and you can conclude that we really had quite a tempo)
We ended our day in Macy’s, enjoying a nice Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream (Chocolate Therapy is the only thing that helps after such a long day), and headed up for the Hilton Hotel. Laurens’ family had invited us for a little drink in the lounge of their hotel, where we could share the adventures of the day, the latest gossip of Eagle Nest Lane, and other very interesting things. Somewhere around midnight, Elke and I headed back to the ferries, and were just on time to the car to avoid a shower. Above our heads, all hell broke loose. Rain was falling out of the sky with almost the same amount as the Niagara Falls we’re visiting next weekend. On top of that, there was a major fog bank over the Long Valley Hills. We were very glad when we finally saw our beds again.
Sunday was the first day in a month that we had to chance to sleep late again. If we weren’t supposed to pick up Laurens at 2PM, I’d probably still be in there . On the way back we stopped at one of the fanciest shopping malls in New Jersey. It even had Valet Parking! We parked our car somewhere in between the porches and the BMW, and did some window shopping at Dior, Chanel and D&G. Did you know they even make a sport out of penny-throwing-in-the-fountain? It’s quite addictive once you start doing it!
Oh and we got some more great news. Eline, a girl from our school who does her internship in Florida, is going to visit us in two weeks! She will be staying here a couple of days to explore New York (For us that means : back up to the Rockefeller, back to Times Square, back to Central Park.. But that’s not that bad. You never get tired of a city like this!)
