New England Places to Visit

• The Johnson's are welcome to stay at our house in Fitchburg while in Massachusetts. We have one spare room, some room in Claire's bedroom and other arrangements we can set up in the living room
• I will put all of this information up on our family website. If you register on our website wiki I can give editing access to all trip members.

• May 8th at 4:30 PM is the university wide commencement, which will be the longer, more boring of the two meetings. It is in Amherst, MA which is an hour away from our house.
• May 9th [time undetermined] is my school's “Senior Recognition Ceremony” and on that day we will also be having a party at our house

My initial thought is that it will take 3-4 days to see Boston stuff and 3 days to see NYC stuff. We can arrange it in any order you want, but I think it might be best to do two days in Boston (Sunday and Monday), three days in NYC (Tuesday-Thursday), and then another two days in Boston (Friday and Saturday). I am planning on taking those days off, and Claire will have some days off of school, but probably not all days.

• Freedom Trail in Boston
• Other Boston Activities (Duck boat tours, museums, pizza tour of Boston and so on)
• Lexington-Concord

• Plymouth rock
• Old Sturbridge Village
• lighthouses on the Maine coast
• Boston Harbor Islands
• Mansions in Providence
• Rhode Island
• Visiting Ivy Leauge colleges

• Woodmans
• Ethiopian food
• Kimball farm ice cream
• Pizza

• Drive to New Haven, CT and take a commuter train into Grand Central Terminal in NYC Get around the City by walking, subway, or cab if needed

The two activities I have heard are:

• Broadway play
• Visiting the Statue of Liberty.

In our experience, you can only do one big activity per day in NYC, and a play and the Statue of Liberty both count as big activities. My recommendation is that we travel to NYC on a morning via the New Haven train line and travel back to Fitchburg on an afternoon. This gives us time to fit in two big activities.

We should have a food plan so we aren’t stuck trying to decide what to do on a crowded street corner in NYC. My preference is to hit the various ethnic foods in NYC. There is:

• Korean
• German
• Mediterranean
• Pizza
• Hundreds of other options
• A lot of food trucks

Renting a house may be the best lodging option - Jeri found a range from $300-600 per night for a house that sleeps 10 or more people. Hotels will cost more for 10 people (very small rooms means 4 to a room at the maximum, so we would need to rent 4 hotel rooms. The best price I have ever seen for a decent (not bed bugs, etc.) hotel in NYC recently is $150 per room per night, so a house might make more sense.