April & May were busy with finding, moving into and furnishing our new rental apartment in New York. After long weeks of searching and many barriers, we finally succeeded, and now live in a lovely two-bedroom duplex overlooking a park in Grammercy above the East Village (view at left). An old maternity hospital, it is a grand building, or 'fancy' as the kids friends like to say and big by New York standards.
My birthday, mothers day and Trinity's birthday all came and went. Mothers day was spent at the cherry blossom festival in Brooklyn botanical gardens, which was packed with people and performances and was exquisite.
Trinity had a party in Central Park in the sheep's meadow on a beautiful spring day. My only sadness was that I didn't bring enough champagne for all the adults that showed up.
I will know next time. We did however have a raccoon show up later in the afternoon, one of the 50 plus population that live in Central Park.
Over these few months India has found her voice, as some of the photos above might hint at. Trinity enjoyed working in her class toward an end of term show. She and her friend Sona got to rehearse in the Blue Man rehearsal space, a cavernous stage in Alphabet City, as well as see and try on the latest merchandise (India tries one a light show mohawk).
There was the usual round of birthday parties for both India and Trinity's school friends. India and friend Lyla enjoy the chance to become someone else or at least themselves in disguise (to the right).
For the Memorial day long weekend (the first weekend of summer), David was presenting at a conference in Orlando, Florida, and we decided to fly down and join him. We booked tickets to Universal Studios to go see Harry Potter as Trinity had recently finished the series. Two days before we were due to go, we found out that some of the Blue men founders where heading down with their families, so we joined their group.
We stayed at the Disney Animal Kingdom hotel, which is built around a zoo. Most days we saw giraffes, zebra's, wildebeests and other wildlife from our window.
T
he first day we went to Universal studios on our own, and found a minimum of two hour lines at all the rides in Harry Potter. It was around 32 degree Celsius and humid, so we didn't have a lot of energy to wait around. We spent time at other rides with shorter waits, like Atlantis (so scary for the girls), and Dr Seuss world, which was lovely.
The next morning we kick
ed off early, and went to the Magic Kingdom on a guided tour. When joining a tour you move to the front of all queues, so we did an incredible 13 rides in our short day. Trinity and India's favourites were Thunder Mountain (their first roller coaster) and 'Its a small world'.
We got to go to Epcot too, watched the fireworks and ran to avoid the crowds at the end of a long day. At one point during the weekend we got caught in torrential rain and ran through the heavy shower and large puddles for a mile to exit the park. This was one of the highlights of trip, proving something meaningful about purchasing power.
The people at Disney are experts in crowd management and I take my hat of to the amazing amount of thought and effort that goes into the Disney experience.
It seems like ultimately it is about minimising effort. Get on a ride and learn about history in three short minutes. A perfect example of the American culture in action. All up an amazing experience, that I hope never to repeat.
Our last port of call before collapsing from exhaustion was Typhoon Lagoon, a water Disney water park with the largest wave pool in the country and many water slides. We spent the day enojying it with thousands of others, though it never felt crowded. It was a ball and we left it all on the court that weekend.
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