My Long-Since-Forgotten Trips to the East Coast

Hey guys, it's Christine! Sorry it's been so super long since I was SUPPOSED to blog, but I honestly have not had enough free time on my hands to do it since I got home from New York City. All that makeup work can catch up to you sometimes. Well I'm so very sorry for all of the loads of pictures and how long this blog is and everything, but I got a little camera happy on our spring break trip, and not camera happy enough on my New York trip, so hopefully I evened it out enough. I haven't done this in a long time so knowing me and pictures and technology and whatnot, this whole blog will probably look all backwards and messed up. I'm hoping you'll be able to put the puzzle together and see the whole story--well, two stories. If you get bored with the boatload of pictures and my oh-so-boring commentary, feel free to redirect yourself to your Facebook news feed or your funny SNL videos on YouTube, because I guarantee those things would be a lot more interesting to do on the computer… But hey! You’ve lasted this long ;)

So to start, I’ll talk about our Spring Break trip to the East Coast, mainly to Washington DC. Just an FYI, I wasn’t around anyone under 55 for 10+ days. That was fun.

Above is the historical house we stayed in! A nice lady that Dad knows lives here, but she was on her own vacation during the break, so she allowed us to stay here when she was gone. It was built hundreds of years ago and was used in the Civil War for something. Parts of the wood on the wood floor on the second floor (Does that make sense?) was actually used as the wood floor in Thomas Jefferson’s schoolhouse! I don’t know how we know this, but we do.

I had my own movie moment when we had the opportunity to walk down an alley! My very first one! It had the cliché dumpsters and all! This one ran down the side of the historical house we stayed in! I was so happy. I’m sure everyone was happy to see that I was easy to entertain for the moment. I felt like a little child.




So this is a legit McDonald’s we saw in Asheville, NC, where we stayed for a little bit. We visited Chris and Jody and Michael and Carolyn who all lived somewhere around there. (It’s been so long, I don’t remember.) We ate lunch here and there was a player piano inside with nice rock chimneys and awesome interior design. Unfortunately, the food was the same as anywhere else in the United States. I was hoping for a cool new menu like you see in McDonald’s places in those random foreign countries. Dad, you know what I’m talking about. I know you go to McDonald's all the time in China or wherever the heck you go on "business trips". Don't lie.








This is the ‘rents standing in front of the largest private home ever built in the… United States..? The world? Who knows anymore.. This “house” has over 250 rooms (I don’t know if that includes the 43 bathrooms or not), built on an 8,000-acre piece of land. Yes, eight thousand acres. That was not a typo. I got bored in the middle of the tour on the headset after about 20 rooms and desperately wanted to leave. I have to admit I was complaining a bit, but they got over it. I did too, luckily.




On the way into Washington DC every day from the house we lived in for the few days that we were there, we would walk the streets for meals and whatnot. The streets were LITERALY LITTERED (pun intended) with cigarettes all over the place. This specific spot on the sidewalk wasn’t even a bad area. I just stopped in a random place and took a picture of the ground. This amount of cigarettes in the cracks of the brick was about average in Asheville, NC. It was a beautiful city, though, if you didn’t look down.




Now in Washington DC! The ‘rents and the g’rents in front of the Washington Monument. We saw pretty much every monument you can name in Washington DC and then there’s at least five more you’ve never heard of that we walked to and saw. We don’t have pictures of every one of them, so I’ll make the list of the things not pictured at the end of this half of the blog.

Photography. (By the way, I was obsessed with cool-lookin’ scenes on this trip, so whenever I say “Photography,” it means it was one of those times when I just felt so inclined to take a picture. Some of them are pretty good, if I do say so myself:)

Photography. At the WWII Memorial, looking at the Washington monument. If you look REALLY closely, you can kind of see the Capitol building pretty far away behind the Washington Monument. It’s kind of hard to tell, though.

And I realize that those girls in the bottom left are a part of the family of girls all sitting like that (There were five of them) and ALL of them had their cracks showing. It was hilarious. I was tempted to take a picture, but I felt like that wouldn’t have been that nice and if they happened to turn around as I was taking a picture of them, who knows if I’d still be alive to write this blog? I’ve been through everything for this blog;)

I really wanted to take a picture next to this. There were columns surrounding the WWII Memorial, each with a state or US territory on it. It didn’t take long to find the Lone Star State. TEXAS REPRESENT!

I couldn’t resist taking a picture of this. We were taking a long walk from the WWII Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial (along the reflecting pool—under construction at the time). I remember looking it up and I think it was like 1/3 mile long or something crazy like that.

Korean War Veteran Memorial

This was what it said on the ground underneath an American flag at the same memorial. I loved to read all the quotes we saw on monuments, so I took pictures.

Photography. The dogwood trees were beautiful!

Photography. This is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.






Inside the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.






Alright now this picture and lots of the following pictures were all taken in either the American History Museum or the Natural History Museum. I can't remember which is which, so these are the museum pictures! The elephant entrance is pictured above.





I don't know if you're able to read the caption, so I'll quote it to you. "Objects owned by or associated with Lincoln quickly became relics, reminding Americans of Lincoln's greatness and challenging them to keep his ideals alive. One of the Smithsonian Institution's most treasured icons is this top hat, worn by Lincoln to Ford's Theatre on the night of his assassination." I thought that was SO cool! It looks like a wooden top hat or something!




"Can You Find Any Flaws in This Crystal Ball? Hard as you look, you won't find any. It is flawless! This is the world's largest flawless quartz sphere--weighing 48.5 kg (106.75 lb) and measuring 32.7 cm (12.9 in) in diameter." This was cool too.




"This iron meteorite formed in the core of an asteroid 4.6 billion years ago. Collisions destroyed the asteroid, and a fragment of its core hit another asteroid. The heat of the impact melted the core fragment. Some liquid metal flowed into fractures and cooled into this shape. Later impacts broke up the asteroid and freed the metal, hurling it to Earth. These two fragments landed in Arizona." Ahhh! :D




We saw so many rocks! These pictures show the diversity in all of them. All of the rocks shown in the above picture are all different forms of calcite! Crazy, I know!




Weird designs in the rocks...




Sunset!




Asbestos! :O




I don't know what type these are because I never took a picture of any caption, but they look cool!






I thought Scott might enjoy this one. The Embassy of Canada! Took this one on our walk to the Capitol Building!






The Capitol




Awkward tree pose with the capitol in the background. Tried to make it as awkward as possible. Did it work?






Photography.







Our favorite pair of missionaries say good-bye! :,(






The weather was WEIRD on the way home. This sky came and went within two minutes, no lie.



List of things we saw, but I don't have a picture of on this blog or anywhere at all:

Lincoln Memorial
Reflecting Pool under construction
Holocaust Museum
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
Rode the metro and the trolley multiple times
Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial
National Archives



And this concludes the first half of my blog!





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Okay so now we’re done with all the pictures from my first trip to the East Coast during Spring Break. Oh, and I’m sorry, but none of these NYC pictures will be in time order because I took so little of them, I don’t remember what we did in order, so I’ll just describe every picture. Hopefully you’ll catch on. Okay, just in case anyone doesn't know why our choir went to New York City and got to skip two days of school, it was because our choir got invited to perform in the Lincoln Center and we had our own concert there! We had four hours of rehearsals everyday, and I lost my voice after the first day AND got sick (still sick, by the way) and started freaking out because I couldn't sing with my voice lost, obviously, and I was NOT going to have worked on my music for two months and worked so hard on it after school every day to lose my voice a day or two before we perform and lip sync! Not happenin'! So I pushed through, warmed up my voice for pretty much two days straight because I was so worried about the performance. I pushed through and sang loud (the louder you sing, the less your voice cracks--for me, anyway). Everything worked out fine, which was good. I didn't care how bad my voice hurt going to rehearsals and preparing for the performance. I was going to strain it UNTIL the performance, especially DURING the performance. I was going to sing. I didn't care what my director told me to do.

I. Was. Going. To. Sing.

Inspiring, I know, right?! Anyway, this is the first picture that I took from my NYC trip for choir. This was taken in the airport getting ready to board the plane. We had to leave RIGHT after school to go to the airport because it was about an hour away, and we had to be at the airport at 3:30 (school gets out at 2:30, so we were cutting it close). I had mom pick me up with the suitcase in the back, ready to go and everything. I'm pretty sure you can see the excitement in my face.

Welcome to NYC! Our first walk along the streets of New York, New York! It was exhilarating. Oh, and by the way, the temperatures were within the thirties and forties the entire time we were there and all I brought was a small zip-up jacket. Apparently I was the only one who didn’t check the weather before we went, too, because I was the only one without a big, heavy coat. I was freezing.

Central Park!

Sometime during this trip, I broke my brush for the very first time! It was a bittersweet moment.

A choir friend that I was rooming with was OBSESSED with Donald Trump, and she desperately wanted to find the Trump Tower so she could take a picture of it. I rolled my eyes but followed her anyway. She was screaming with excitement when she found it and called her parents immediately after taking a million pictures of it from twenty different angles. I didn’t see what the big deal was. I mean, we saw plenty of better things in New York, but whatever. Man, look who’s talking? I was the one that got so excited when we walked down an alley. I guess we all have our weird exciting moments every once in a while, huh...

You obviously know what this picture is of….

A taxi taking a corner too quickly! Yeah, that’s it.

We saw two broadway shows when we were there. The first one we saw was Phantom of the Opera, and it was so amazing!

The second broadway show we saw was Jersey Boys! I originally took this picture with my intention for “Wicked” to be my focus, and I didn’t even know the sign for Jersey Boys right above it! Two birds with one stone, right? WOAH! And I like JUST now noticed that Phantom is on the side, too! Three! I think it’s a record, especially since it was unintentional! I’m just that cool.

Oh and I didn’t really like Jersey Boys at all. The music was good, but the rest was just so inappropriate with bad language and everything. I wanted to get up and leave, but where was I going to go in New York City by myself? I wasn’t even allowed to leave. The second act was better than the first, but I wouldn’t recommend this show to anyone. Do not go. Upsetting, I know. (

We went to this cool Italian restaurant called Carmines that was pretty good! It was the best food I had on this trip, so it was picture worthy.

Waiting in our hotel lobby next to random artwork, ready to go to Carmines, then to Phantom. I was imitating the lady in the picture and I have no idea what Katie was doing. She’s the one who was obsessing over the Trump Tower. Smh.

Grand Central Station! We did a flash mob here as a choir. We sang one of my favorite choir songs all together, and it sounded really pretty. Even though we didn’t get much of a reaction from all the busy travelers, I still enjoyed it a lot.

This statue ball-type thing was actually in the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11/01. If you look closely toward the top of the ball, you can see burn marks from that memorable day. You can also see the 9/11 memorial building under construction in the background. Underneath is the building closer up.

The new 9/11 memorial under construction. I think they have about 90-100 stories already. I’m not sure how many stories they’re intending on making the building, but if you really want to know, I’m sure you can look it up, like I should do right now, but I refuse because of my laziness. I’ve already been working on this blog for 5 hours.

The statue of liberty! You can see the crowds upon crowds of people in line to get on a boat to go see it closer up, but this is a VERY small fraction of how many people were actually in line. It seemed like the line stretched for miles and we had to go to rehearsal anyway. Plus, it was like SUPER DUPER cold outside, and we wanted to continue walking around to keep warm. Understandable, right?

I randomly fell asleep on the hotel ground IN BETWEEN the two hotel beds, and my roommates threw everything on me and took a picture on my phone. Thanks, guys.

We had dinner at Ellen’s. People who wish to be on broadway someday can apply to work here. The waiters and waitresses walk around the restaurant and sing all types of songs. Some sat at tables and sang to the people eating, and it was really fun!

We were walking around Julliard in between rehearsals or something, and we found this sign, announcing our performance in the Lincoln Center! We all just HAD to take a picture. The director on our NYC trip is on the bottom out of the three people pictured on this sign.

The temple! This is across the street from the Lincoln Center/Julliard! I was so happy because as we were walking toward the Lincoln Center for rehearsal, I remembered that the temple was really close, so I turned my head, and what do you know? The temple was RIGHT THERE! I got so excited and I whipped out my phone to take like five pictures of it at different angles. People usually did the same thing when they saw people taking out their cell phones to take pictures because they didn’t want to miss anything that they could’ve taken a picture of, right? But when they started to look for what I was taking a picture of, they were just looking around, and they were so confused as to what in the world I was taking a picture of! It looks JUST like all the other buildings except it has Moroni on top. They were so confused. I explained, but then they didn't care, so I celebrated by myself on the inside. Don't worry;)

Good-bye New York City! On the bus on our way to the Newark airport to head home. It was a very sad drive. This was literally the last glimpse we had of the city. Right after this picture was taken, the bus went into a tunnel for a few miles, and when we came out, the NYC skyline was nowhere to be seen. *tear*

Things we saw or did that I don't have pictured:

Waved at the Today Show! I was actually on TV like right up front, too! It was pretty cool.
Shopping in Times Square
Group picture in Times Square
CONCERT AT THE LINCOLN CENTER
Reception afterwards
Group picture in front of the Lincoln Center
Snack with Julliard students (I felt so cool)
Subway Tour (where we saw the 9/11 memorials, the statue of liberty, etc.)





And I just decided to throw this one in there. This has nothing to do with either trip, I just found it on Facebook on some post and I loved the quote. Everyone read it. Now.

Okay so this concludes my post. There were multiple pictures that were lost between me emailing all the pictures one-by-one from my photo gallery on my cell phone to myself a me opening all the emails one-by-one on the desktop and downloading them a saving every picture one-by-one a putting each picture on the blog edit page a copy/pasting each picture one-by-one in a Word document because the order of all the pictures and captions got all messed up a copying/pasting the entire blog back into the blog edit page a saving my draft a finally publishing the post.

Now tell me. IS THERE A BETTER WAY?!?!

I hope you enjoyed my blog. I've had to redo the whole thing, basically. I'm so frustrated.