New York State of Mind...

As many of you who read this already know, I took a group of my students to the National High School Model United Nations (NHSMUN) conference in New York City over Spring Break week. We had a great time at the conference as well as doing all of the cool things that NYC has to offer and you just cannot find in Anchorage, AK no matter how hard you look.

So, I thought I would take a day or two and share some of our adventures as we traveled east across the continent to the Big Apple. We had many adventures over the week we were there. The first day of our trip we took a cruise to Liberty Island and Ellis Island.


This is the view of the Statue of Liberty from the cruise boat. I was surprised that she wasn't as big as I had believed, but still pretty big and built during the 1880's. Pretty impressive. Unfortunately, you can no longer climb all the way through her to the crown, but you can go all the way to where the statue meets the base.


A pretty cool picture of me standing on the observation level of the Statue of Liberty's base. It was a beautiful day, if a little cold, and you could see for miles.


This is my group of kids around the Ellis Island sign. Ellis Island was pretty neat, but by this time my back was killing me from all the walking (almost 10 miles according to my pedometer) and I didn't know that you had to pay to do research on people that came through Ellis Island. I was hoping to look up both sides of my family and see if anyone that I am related to journeyed through the mess that was Ellis Island at its busiest time.


This is the main hall of Ellis Island where literally millions of immigrants stood waiting to be accepted into our country. It was humbling to stand there and look down into the hall and imagine the lives that went through there and the dreams that were crushed when people were denied entry into our nation.