Traveling with Lara

The premise of this trip was because my childhood best friend and I discovered that we are huge Friends fans.  We wanted to do the Friends Experience in New York City. She had heard mixed reviews of other Friends Experiences so we weren't sure what to expect. Two of my kids also came with us.  Since I watch Friends, they have seen all the episodes too.  We arrived at our scheduled time and we put in a group with others.  We got some ground rules and from there, the wall opened to reveal the orange couch, fountain, and lamp. We got our pictures taken and then walked on to the next room which was filled with costumes, signed scripts, and the floor layouts of the apartments. Next we went down the steps to the next room where there were more costumes and props from the show.  These included Uberweiss, Phoebe's doll house, and Smelly Cat, cat litter.   It was easy to overlook some of the props because there is so much to look at.  I think one of my fav...

I wasn't really expecting the beauty of Ithaca, New York. I didn't get to see all the waterfalls that I had planned but the few that we did see were stunning. We went to the Taughannock State Park and stood at the shoreline listening to the water crash against the rocks. We took our pictures and then went to search the for Taughannock Falls.  We drove by the turn off a few times because the GPS was not routing us there correctly. Once we found it, rain was pouring but we got out of the car to look anyway. The rain created a mist that covered the falls but we could hear the roar as water cascaded down the rocks. We saw a few other falls during our search that were just as breath taking.  The next morning we ate breakfast at this lovely place, Ithaca Bakery.  They were a bakery, deli, and coffee shop rolled into one.  We ordered breakfast which was amazing and then went back to Taughannock Falls.  Even though we were on a time line, this was so worth coming back t...

The tour itself was good, you see the sights of New York. That said, the staff don't really care about line control. My group and I waited over a half hour for a bus to arrive at a stop and we were behind another group of 4. Lots of people behind us tried to push their way in front since we had all been waiting for a while. As those people pushed their way to the doors, the staff did nothing to stop this. The majority of us had tickets for the Statue of Liberty boat tour. We were advised to arrive a half hour before the tour for boarding. That was hard to do when we were relying on the tour service to get us there. We finally arrived to the tour but the boat was full and we were all advised to reschedule to the next one.   We also decided to do the night tour which was so oversold. We had tickets for the 8:30 pm tour we didn't get on the tour until 10:00 pm.  As long as you had a ticket, you could ride.  The tour time didn't matter.  I've done Grayline Tours in ...