Brooklyn is a part of New York City that, for no particular reason, I have completely managed to ignore for pretty much the entirety of my adult life. No matter how many times I have been to NYC since becoming an adult, my trips have always kept me within Manhattan or, at furthest, Queens. It really wasn't so much of a conscious effort to avoid Brooklyn, but rather the simple reality that I never had a reason to go there. And there is simply so much to do in NYC that unless you are staying for a good stretch of time, it is really easy to not even think about traveling to the other boroughs. But our recent trip to New York this summer gave us our first ever reason to visit Brooklyn and I realized that by having kept to Manhattan, I had missed out on what is a truly thriving and vibrant part of New York City.