NYC and Waterfalls

I had an incredibly busy weekend! I spent 18 hours on Saturday on a trip to New York City, a place I had never been to before. Then on Sunday, we took a trip to a local swimming area in one of the gorge creeks, featuring a gorgeous waterfall!

The weekend's story will be told in pictures.

New York! We were dropped off at Bryant Park in Manhattan, which is why you see very thick foliage. There were so many pretty buildings!

We walked for a while in the general direction of Times Square (one of the nearest landmarks to our drop-off point)....

Eventually stopping for coffee and muffins. The tea was very good.

Times Square is a much larger place than I thought it was. The iconic actual "square", where the ball drops on January 1st, is only a small part of the Times Square "district" (I guess you would call it) which takes up several square blocks of large advertisements, restaurants, two-story high-end clothes shopping, and endless, endless crowds.

We would eventually come back to this area to eat dinner, but here is the iconic "square". The picture doesn't really do it justice. It was very busy, very colorful, very loud. The animated billboards covered every surface of the surrounding buildings.

(I thought this architecture was nice. It was a restaurant on the first floor.)

Then we continued to head north into Central Park! I was really impressed with Central Park. It was very large, very well-kept, and very busy. 

Our eventual destination after Central Park (and a bit of lunch) was the Museum of Natural History. This was the museum where the movie Night at the Museum was filmed. (They have several "Night at the Museum" children's programs.)

That is a blue whale! Actual size!

This was probably my favorite part of the museum. It's the largest meteorite on display in a public museum in the country. You could walk up to it and touch it, they had sections cut off so you could see what the inside looked like, and the entire exhibit was meteorites, moon rocks, and Mars rocks. This meteorite was formed sometime around the beginning of the solar system. And I got to TOUCH IT. I'm still nerding out about it honestly. It's a billions-year old rock FROM OUTER SPACE. 

Also, if y'all have time you should look up Widmanstätten patterns! They were super cool, and I talked to one of the museum staff for a while about it.

My phone ran out of battery shortly after this, so no more pictures from NYC. We rode the subway back to Times Square, where we had dinner at a really nice BBQ place (I got a black bean burger, for those of you wondering). Then we got gelato for the 4.5 hour ride home. 

Now, the falls! The next day we all slept in, and decided to try to go to a local swimming area that we had heard about. The area was in a state park about 15 minutes away (we drove in two cars). 

Where the water exits the pool.

The pool itself! The area in the foreground is 4-6 feet deep. After the buoys in the background, closer to the waterfall, it's more like 10-12 feet deep. 

It was a popular place on a Sunday!

The pool was surrounded by the awesome rock walls of the gorge.

You could swim close enough to the waterfall to climb the ridges carved in it by the water, or to just let yourself get drenched. The water from the waterfall was warmer than the water in the pool!

So that was my weekend. Coming back into work today was difficult after so much socializing and adventure! I had a really good time, and I'm starting to make really good friends with the people here. 

The next "grand adventure" is Niagara Falls in mid-July, but hopefully I'll do some more exploring of these gorges before then! More pretty pictures!