“So please tell me you’re at least a tiny bit excited now?!” I asked the girls, with a little exaggeration in my voice.

They were sitting across the table from me, in the deserted food court of concourse A, terminal 8, at JFK airport in New York City.  It was 11pm and our flight to Peru was scheduled to take off at five minutes to midnight.

We were surrounded by empty tables, with the chairs stacked on top of them, silently waiting for the morning travellers.  Nonetheless, there was still a small lineup at the McDonalds, which was still open, and so was the small sandwich and snack shop where we had selected some Cheerios and milk and banana, and some orange juice.  Odd timing for such a meal, but Clara and Jillian are always happy to have cereal in a pinch.  I had been very pleased to find it at the airport at this hour, since I knew they would not only gobble it up, but would probably relax a bit once they had some familiar food.  Hence my question about whether they were excited about the trip. Timing is often the thing that matters most when trying to get a real answer from ten-year-old girls.

“No,” Clara answered nonchalantly in response. She examined her spoon before taking another mouthful. Not only was she supposedly not excited about the trip, she was certainly doing her best to appear not even interested in my conversation.

“No?!” I said, “Not even a little bit?  Your friend Heather is smart enough to be super excited for you to be able to visit all these places.  She wishes she could go herself!”

“That’s because she likes travelling,” said Clara.

“Yeah, and she likes visiting new places, and doing new things,” added Jillian.

We had been through this routine before, the girls had professed zero interest in the trip for about the past year.  But every so often a stray comment would reveal that they were at least a little apprehensive, in a good way, about some of the things we planned on doing.

“You do so like travelling and visiting new places!”  I insisted.  “You liked going to the Olympics….”

“That’s because the Olympics were in Canada,” said Clara.

“You liked visiting Norway,” I continued.  We went on a family trip to Scandinavia for our tenth anniversary, returning with the family to where Barbara and I honeymooned.  “Look, you remember the bill I keep in my wallet–”  When we were in Sweden, I found a Chinese 10 Yuan note on the floor of an American-style steak house.  It seemed to me a small but powerful sign of globalization, and I have kept it in my wallet ever since. “–the world is becoming smaller, this trip is our chance to see many places while they’re still the way they are.”

“The world is not going to get smaller, Dad,” Jillian said, in between mouthfuls. If she hadn’t been so intent on what she was eating, she would have been rolling her eyes at me.  “The earth is going to stay the same size.  The sun is going to get a lot bigger in 5 billion years and then the earth is going to explode.”

I had to chuckle at her smart remark.  “Well, at least I know you were paying attention at the museum yesterday!” I said.

“No, I knew that already,” she said.

This was the end of our four days in New York City.  The highlight for the girls was clearly Henry, the cat.  They had played with him every chance they could get, and being a friendly, good natured cat, he seemed happy to go along with it.  Henry was such a star of their week, that when we headed for the airport tonight, the girls left a thank you note for Henry and his owner, complete with a hand drawn portrait of the cat.  In between feline frolicking, we did manage to fit in a few other things since Monday….

On Monday evening we checked out the local grocery store near the apartment we were renting.  Brooklyn grocery stores aren’t much different from home, no surprise there, and frozen rising crust pizza tastes the same south of the border too.  For desert, we made a trip into Manhattan just to visit Rice to Riches (hey, where else is there a desert place open until 11pm every night (1am on weekends!) that exclusively serves dozens of flavours of rice pudding??  We have to experience these things while we have the chance — that is why we’re travelling the world!).

On Tuesday, we went shopping at Century 21, right beside the World Trade Center site, and picked up some belts for the girls, and I got an excellent, light weight, Columbia jacket.  When Barbara realized there had been a snafu around the timing of meeting her friends at the Museum of Natural History, she high-tailed it north on the subway while the girls and I enjoyed lunch at Subway, the restaurant.  We then headed to the museum on the A train too.  But when we got to 59th/Columbus Circle, we had to transfer to a local train for the last two stops, and I asked the girls if they wanted to wait for the train, or just walk through Central Park.

The girls have visited Central Park many times before.  We have pictures of them when they’re about three, climbing on the rocks with me.  Clara gave it a moment’s thought and said we should walk instead of waiting for a train.  So up we went and into the park.  Even now, they like scampering across the large rock formations in the park (and in fact, the next day when we returned to the museum and had lunch at one of the food trucks across the road, Clara decided we should go sit on the rocks in the park to eat our food).

At one point, as we wound our way through the pathways towards the museum, we came across a food cart, and got a real New York City pretzel to snack on as we continued towards the museum.  Eventually, we arrived to find the lobby absolutely crawling with people, students mostly.  The challenge was then to find Barbara.  I huddled the girls into a corner of the lobby and started to look for wifi signals with one of their iPods.  But technology was rendered irrelevant in short order.

“Hey, there’s mom,” said Jill, spying Barbara in her red coat, sitting on the edge of the dinosaur display that dominates the entrance rotunda.

Barbara’s New York friend had had to leave, but over a quick lunch and coffee she had explained that tomorrow would be a better day for the museum; the reason it was packed today is that it was the last day of spring break for the local schools.  So, we left the museum without seeing anything, and walked across Central Park to the Guggenheim, which the girls had been to before and seemed to like.

This time though, a combination of tired feet from walking so much, and tired girls from not enough sleep meant they weren’t so interested in the Japanese modern art that was on special exhibition at the museum.  Nonetheless, we did walk all the way up the spiral, and saw some interesting pieces.

After that, it was time to go back to the apartment, and there was even napping on the subway.  We all had a rest when we got home, though the girls barely lay down, so we told them to write out their times tables if they didn’t have anything else to do.  A while later, I was woken up by a girl shoving a spiral notebook in my face, which had times tables written out in different directions, up, down, side to side, so no inch of space was wasted.

The day was far from over, however.  A couple years ago, we waited in line for at least an hour to get into Grimaldi’s, the legendary pizza restaurant right near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.  The girls wanted a return visit.  So for dinner, we got back on the good ol’ subway, and found our way to the Brooklyn Bridge and Grimaldi’s.

The thing is, though, that the creator of Grimaldi’s had sold the rights to the name, and the whole restaurant, way back in the 1990s.  Since our last visit two years ago, that new owner had moved the restaurant a few doors down to a different location.  This meant the original location was available and so the original owner came back and started a new pizza restaurant in the same place, now called Juliana’s.  (Got all that?!)  So, we ended up at Juliana’s, not at Grimaldi’s, but the pizza was even better than we remembered it from before, and the ambiance was way, way, better.  And, we ended up with nearly a whole pizza in leftovers for the next night, so that worked out really well.

Wednesday, we spent the whole day back at the Museum of Natural History.  We took in all the special exhibits, including a fantastic IMAX film about how researchers from UofT and assistants from across North America eventually unravelled the mystery of the migration of Monarch butterflies.  Hey, it’s a museum, you have to take all the suspense and mystery wherever you can get it!  Also excellent was the planetarium show (which explained among other things how the earth will explode in 5 billion years) as well as several other exhibits, including of course the incredible dinosaur exhibit, one of the best in the world, and so cleverly organized according to the evolutionary traits the fossils have in common.

The girls seemed to be drawn subconsciously to every touch screen in the place.   They do get a lot out of them, there was one in the excellent exhibit about food production and consumption that showed where and how different foods they know are produced and shipped around the world (including the banana they were to enjoy a couple nights later at the airport), and the touch screen let them walk step by step, at their own pace, through a ton of information that would have taken up several pages if it were written out.

Later, after eating left over pizza back at the apartment, we couldn’t just call it a night.  This is the city that never sleeps!  So off we went to Times Square (the M&M store in particular).  We looked in a few places and walked up and down past the lights, bright enough to seem like daytime.  In one trinket shop, Clara found a small souvenir New York license plate with her name on it. Nothing ever has the name “Clara” on it, so that was an immediate sale.

Today, Thursday, we let the girls sleep in and play with Henry more.  But Barbara was up early to go to the UN to get tickets for the children’s tour that was on at 4pm.  Apparently I was not awake when she was searching for the keys to the apartment before she left, since I supposedly was unable to tell her where the keys were, but did insist, several times, that we did not have keys to the airport!  Anyway, she made it there and back, tickets in hand, and then, once the girls had had their fill of making Henry chase toys, we headed to midtown, and French Roast, one of our favourite New York restaurants.

I think we spent as much time on the wifi as we did eating; there was some last minute trip planning to catch up on.  Anyway, after a delicious lunch, we wanted to fit in the Roosevelt Island Tramway before the tour of the UN.  We had just enough time to take the tram over to the island, snap a few pictures of Manhattan from there, and take the tram back, before walking south to the UN headquarters.

The tour was excellent, with an animated guide from Brazil, who really engaged the kids with simple explanations of why the UN exists and how it works and what it does.  Our girls who supposedly don’t like travelling at all, if you remember, were in fact closely paying attention and had their hands up for all the questions.  Jillian was particularly excited to spy the name plate for New Zealand in the General Assembly chamber (being the world’s biggest fan of the Hobbit movie and all things Lord of the Rings — both girls are in fact watching the Hobbit movie on the overnight plane to Peru right now, instead of sleeping like their mother).

As the tour guide shared all her information and questions, I admit to taking some pride in knowing the newest member country of the UN is South Sudan.  In Journalism school we had to follow the news very closely, and were quizzed on headlines major and obscure on a regular basis, and staying on top of the news is a habit (addiction?) that I have yet to break.

Although five months travelling around the world may just do it!

And so ends the beginning of our journey.  It was not without a few bumps along the way (why were both elevators and the escalator not working at Howard Beach station when we got off the subway with all our luggage and had to make our way up stairs to get the airport shuttle train?!).  But so far we haven’t forgotten anything (that we’ve realized yet!) and we’re on our way to Peru.  Both Barbara and I said this morning that we were now truly excited about the rest of the trip, it really felt like all the work was now leading to what we had planned all along.  Visiting the UN on our last day in New York City was the perfect send off for us all on this big adventure, and I think the girls got it.  No matter what they say, I think they are excited now, maybe just a little bit, to see as much of the world as we can, before the earth explodes.