New York City!

*snores* I am so tired, y'all. Here are my photos:

First up: the rest of the photos I took on Sunday (after we left the house), starting with this of the fire pit at the GS council office. It has some loose bricks that could be rather dangerous. (I had to do a safety assessment of this site a couple of weeks ago.)

Betsy's DFTBA bracelet! I have one as well, in blue. We got them at Universal Studios when we were in Orlando last November. Don't Forget To Be Awesome!

Moss on the parking lot. Yeah, I got stared at for taking this one. But just look at that focus! It's magnificent! And the detail! *swoon*

I won't show you all of them, but I took a lot of pictures like this. I put my camera on "museum" to get a slower shutter speed and pressed the shutter button just as a car or truck drove past.

Some interesting lines were the result!

This one also includes reflections in the Tennessee River of the Chattanooga lights:

Ah, the story with this picture. We were just inside Virginia, near Wytheville, when our bus just stopped. It was about half past three in the morning. They tried adding gas, they tried jumping it, but the bus just wouldn't start up. So we sat there for five hours until something they did worked. After the sun came up we finally got going somehow, but before that happened they placed this sign across the road so the passing motorists wouldn't hit the people working on our bus.

I got ZERO fire hydrant shots, but here's a mailbox! I don't remember where it was - some truck stop. It's where we had breakfast Monday, so somewhere in Virginia. Virginia, by the way? The state that never ends.

I love this stuff... it's good AND good for you!

Hello Virginia! This was after we stopped for breakfast AND after I slept for a while. Like I said, Virginia goes on forever and ever.

I LOVE this picture and definitely would have uploaded it to the project site if I wasn't doing vacation pics.

Real NYC taxis! (With a horribly slow shutter speed... which actually gives it a kinda cool look)

This are the lights just inside the place we stopped for dinner in the city: Chelsea Market.

Inside Chelsea Market, we ate at Friedman's Lunch. I had a hamburger!

Random beautiful pipe:

Random hardware! (On a door)

Ooh, the street-paint arrows in NY look different than the ones in Birmingham. Theirs are longer:

Long exposure in the Lincoln Tunnel (which is EXCEEDINGLY long, holy crap):

The BEST view of the city at night is actually from Hoboken in New Jersey, which is where we stopped to take these shots. I only had one or two really turn out, but Betsy got a FANTASTIC one! Check it out on the project site by clicking here.

I love having a sister who shares my love of photography, because when I asked if I could photograph her muffin at breakfast, she was like, "Sure."

Holy muffins, this billboard just tickled me half to death. This storage company had other funny signs all over the city, but this was my favorite.

We had tickets to this, the Seaport Museum, that were good for Tuesday or Wednesday. Except... the museum wasn't open until Thursday. Fail.

The sky was absolutely beautiful Tuesday, and I love how it reflects in the shiny buildings:

Chinatown, I officially love you. But John Green officially hates you.

There goes Emily trying to be artistic again... this was on a picture frame at the restaurant where we ate lunch in Little Italy.

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street! (I love Dr. Seuss.)

The Empire State Building was fun! It was cold and windy way up there, but it wasn't nearly as terrifying as I thought it would be. The view was spectacular, and I got some great pictures:

See? You can see for miles! (This was right before the sun set - see my project photo for the 15th for a great night shot.)

On Wednesday we all got up at an ungodly hour and trucked over to the Today show in the RAIN and the COLD. It was absolutely miserable. When I felt frostbite setting in, I knew I had to get inside. So I went to this below-street-level mall-type-thing next to the ice rink you always see on TV and had some hot chocolate. Sure, Betsy got to shake hands with Al Roker. But I was WARM.

Then it was time for a bus ride 'round the city to see some sights. Near the site of the Twin Towers, there was this random bit of fence to which people have attached ceramic tiles painted with hopeful and inspiring messages and pictures. (And it actually needs to be rotated clockwise, but... Emily's tired.)

It's the post office! Along the top there, I don't know if you can see it, but it has that famous motto of postal workers: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." (Actually, the postal workers have no official motto, according to Wikipedia...)

Then we took a ferry across the river...

From which we saw Lady Liberty! She was closed to the public, though, so we stayed on and rode the ferry over to Ellis Island.

There goes Emily being artistic again:

Our ferry, "Miss Liberty," was very nice and even had food for sale.

The architecture inside the building on Ellis Island is spectacular - this ceiling is three stories tall!

This just looks like a super-fun place to do your laundry, right??

See this NBC peacock symbol? This is a decoration on the railing inside their gift shop. In front of this railing sits a very LARGE version of the logo...

...AND IT'S FILLED WITH SIX DIFFERENT COLORS OF M&Ms! Man, the lengths to which New Yorkers will go to be the biggest and the best.

Before going to our Broadway show (*grumble* Spider-man *grumble*), we stopped in at the Toys 'R Us in Times Square. The walkway just inside is lighted with these cool colored dots:

And they have a THREE-STORY ferris wheel! The rest of my photos are blurry, so here's a shot of its inner workings. You're welcome, nerds! Betsy rode it with our friend Kirsten, in a car shaped like one of those red cars that little kids can go around in... I think they're made by Fisher Price. Here's a picture.

The lamp posts outside the Plaza Hotel (home of the much-loved and rather annoying Eloise) have some really disturbing carvings if you care to look closely:

On Thursday I took the subway for the first time, from Grand Central Station! It's absolutely beautiful, and given time to get used to it, I could really learn to like the subway.

RANDOMLY INSERTED PICTURE OF OLD GIRL SCOUT BADGES! We visited the National Headquarters on Fifth Avenue and got the grand tour.

Another subway pic. I love the way they denote the different lines, with these bold circles. It appeals to the designer in me, I guess.

We didn't actually ENTER Central Park, but we did see into part of it. Here's a nice bridge over a body of water. Atop the bridge are probably drunk revelers - this was St. Patrick's Day, after all.

A less-disturbing carving from the same lamp post at the plaza:

And another shot from Grand Central. It struck me as funny that they'd use the word "REMARKS," for some reason. It's a perfectly good word; perhaps I was just surprised to see such a nice word, having just escaped the madness of the revelers.

My very last NYC picture: a T-Mobile billboard. They're my carrier, so I have to show them a little love here. And honestly, this billboard is pretty funny!

Vacation = Photo Binge

Okay, so I might have gone a little overboard on the photography on this trip, y'all. How many did you take, Emily? Um... a few... How many? Oh all right... like, 160. *is shocked into silence*

So yeah, I took a lot of photos. But they're pretty! Wanna see?

These in the first batch were all taken at Baylor Academy in Chattanooga. We met with the choir there and performed with and for them. It's such a beautiful campus, with all these trees (young and old) and big brick buildings.

Here's a different and brighter shot of that same tree. I took these while we were out on the lawn for a fire drill. Funny story, that - remind me to tell you.

Holy muffins, they had REAL plates and REAL pizza and it was delicious. I was very impressed.

I think this is the computer science building, through a tree.

My choir director spotted me taking this photo of a bush and complimented me for taking such artistic shots.

Another iteration of my favorite winter image - a bare tree against a cloudy sky.

Because I'm weird, staircases fascinate me. They're always one of the first things I look at when I visit a university campus, and I really liked these.

Baylor abuts the Tennessee River, and they own the island you can see in the background there.

This is definitely the computer science building. It looks so tall and imposing - I love it.

So that was Friday (actually we also went to Hamilton Place Mall and a murder mystery dinner show, but I didn't take any pictures), so let's move on to Saturday. I'll probably put most of it in another post, but here's a little taste.

This is the view as we rode our giant tour bus up the mountain to Ruby Falls. I love how even the really big buildings look tiny when you're up that high.

Our view of the TN River on the way up was simply breathtaking.

Here are a couple of "down in the caves" pictures. Mostly you can't really tell what it's supposed to be (and more often that not it isn't supposed to be anything), but they're still pretty.

See, isn't the light kinda nice? This one almost puts me in mind of a giant bonfire or something, just with the way the light is shaped.

3 flags outside the caves - Tennessee, the United States, and Ruby Falls.

Under the flags was this lovely water feature, which the choir sat in front of to have our picture taken.

After touring the caves you can walk up several flights of stairs to this observation tower...

...where the view is something like this. It's pretty spectacular.

 Oh wait, another cave picture. This one is more my speed. I'm a macro girl, through and through.

My friends actually laughed at me for stopping to capture this. I responded, "Y'all, this fire hydrant is GORGEOUS!"

And of course, the falls. SO pretty. When you walk into the "room," it's all dark and there's quiet music playing.

Then, as the music reaches its most exciting moment, the lights are thrown on and the wonder of Ruby Falls is revealed.

You can even walk around behind the water (if you don't mind being splashed a little), where you can better see the mechanism used to create the color effects.

That ought to do it for this post, folks. When I've done my other stuff I'll post about Rock City and the aquarium.

Oh yeah, the fire drill story. See, at my school the fire alarms have a tendency to go off rather often. Often enough that they've now put in the official school literature that a real fire will be signaled by a bell AND an announcement. So when we were sitting around in Baylor's choir room and the fire alarm went off (which we later learned was because their director had just turned on the heat), we just sort of looked around, unconcerned. Finally somebody from Baylor was like, "Um... guys, I think we should evacuate." It just didn't occur to us that we should do anything until an announcement was made. That's fire safety at its finest. :D