Nyuck Nyuck.

Unfortunately due to the combination of the excitement of flying, which is always great fun for me, and the baby going off behind us, I didn’t get much sleep on the way over. They had a nifty little channel on the DirectTV that showed where you were over the U.S., and I had fun tracking our route from time to time. At one point I’m pretty sure I was pretty close to directly over my parents who were on a trip of their own to Colorado and Wyoming. I of course hadn’t yet informed them of my own trip, so I found that hilarious. I’m not irresponsible though, I kept in touch with a few people after giving them my itinerary, in case things didn’t go according to plan.

Eventually, we did touch down at JFK on schedule, around 9am EST. This is where the real fun began for me. For once, I had no actual travel plans, no perfect routes, no strategy for getting to major attractions in a certain order or time period. Upon touching down, I was at an airport I’d never been to, in a city I’d only visited once, years previous. I actually didn’t even have my license at that point and thus didn’t do any driving, and have no idea whether we even stayed on Manhattan or somewhere else. So, my skills as a navigator would get a pretty good test throughout the weekend.

The first challenge was how to get from our gate to the subway, which apparently involved taking some sort of bus. After wandering around a couple terminals following the big Buses sign, we eventually found our way to a pile of people hanging out under like 10 signs all talking about different kinds and numbers of buses going various places. Of course none of them said “Subway” which would have been nice. After asking someone for help (yes even I do it occasionally) we figured out the yellow topped bus is what we needed, and were eventually merrily on our way. The subway system of payment was pretty easy to figure out, we decided buy 5 get 1 free should work out pretty well initially.

I really need to say something about how cool subways are. If Los Angeles had subways, the concept of traffic would be easily avoided. I don’t know why millions or billions haven’t been spent to make everyone’s life a little easier. They’re just the coolest things ever. You pay the $2 fare (which is the same whether you’re going 1 stop or from JFK all the way uptown), wait for the right train, up it zooms, open doors, walk in, close doors, and within seconds are zipping right along. For many people this might be an everyday fact of life, but for me this is something I’d love to be able to do as a commute. Not only is it easy and brainless, but you can be doing whatever you want since you’re not having to drive, like read. Even if you’re bored, there’s always relatively constant entertainment moving through the cars as you’ve probably heard. The system when you first look at it is pretty complicated, as there’s trains numbered 1-9 as well as like A-F, so figuring out what stops where and what destinations require transfers takes a bit of puzzling at first. The real catch is later in the evening after rush hour half the trains stop running, so the train you thought would take you isn't there, and the stop that you wanted to get off at gets skipped. Overall though, since Manhattan is set up like a grid, you just need to figure out whether you’re going uptown or downtown, and then make sure to go down the subway entrance on the right side of the street, when you’re facing your destination, so you’re sure to end up going the right direction and not end up on the wrong side of the tracks. Well, at least it sounds simple in my head. So yes anyway, subways are my preferred method of transportation.

Eventually we pop out at 110th street, right on the corner of Central Park. This was very neat, as I’d never been to Central Park. More on it later. The address of our hotel was on 107th, but the map I’d had didn’t have addresses, so I wasn’t really sure where along the almost a mile gap between the park and the Hudson River our hotel was. Figures it was like five blocks uphill. We actually blew by the place initially as I had read the address wrong, and had to backtrack, one of the minor navigation gaffes of the weekend. It was easy to miss though. Now, the way that we picked this place was surfing Expedia I think, sorting by price and reading the descriptions. Thus it was pretty dang cheap given it was on Manhattan. Now, the phrase you get what you pay for has never been more prevalent than in reference to our hotel. It was more like a foreign exchange student hostel. I heard no English spoken the entire time I was there. There were six floors, and we managed to get a room on the sixth. Heat rises, people. I’d say the room was about seven feet by maybe twelve feet, honest dimensions. There was a window, but 99% of the time no breeze was moving in or out. I’d estimate the temperature in the room during the day to be about 95 degrees, and during the night around 90. This was really the sole downer of the whole trip. The bed was slightly bigger than a twin, but certainly not a double. Some sort of 1.5 person style. Thus nights (or days depending on the sleeping schedule) consisted of being as naked as possible, lying inert on top of all the blankets and trying to ignore the heat and somehow fall asleep. This was not easy, and I failed most of the time. The bathroom by the way, was shared among half the floor. College dorm style I guess. It actually wasn’t all THAT dirty, and thus I can probably only put this at the second worst accommodations I’ve ever stayed at, behind the piece of trash in downtown Berkeley I stayed at once.

Oh I forgot to mention, we got to the hotel at 11, and found out checkin wasn’t until 3. Big bummer. We’d been travelling almost a full day, and just wanted to take a nap, but as it turned out had to stuff our bags in a $5 locker downstairs and go wander around.

We first hit up an Italian sidewalk café, where I had some lobster ravioli which was a new one for me. Very tasty stuff, although they lost our order for about 45 minutes until we said something, and then proceeded to be completely out of what she ordered so she had to order something else that took even longer. We were slightly irritated given we’d gone a long time without food, but that was a mere hiccup in the cheerfullness of the trip that was over as soon as our tummies were full. We then wandered up to Columbia University, which was apparently a place her brother was considering and thus many pictures were taken. Pretty neat looking place, lots of too rich for words people walking around snooty and proper.

After that we decided to go get a better look at Central Park. This is easily my favorite park I can remember. If I ever live in NYC, I’ll have to live within a mile of it, or it just wouldn’t be as amazing as it could be. The thing is gigantic. You could have 10k routes setup through it for each day of the week without repeating any paths. You can easily travel from flat pavement to a sloping trail to a granite rock face in the course of a few minutes. There are lakes and ponds, just a truckload of wildlife, and enough sunny grassy knolls to satisfy even the most avid reader. It really is a neat place to hang out. Unfortunately having packed light I had no running shoes so I couldn’t take advantage, although given the blistering heat that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway.

Eventually checkin time came and we wandered back to discover the room as described above. Tired, full, and hot, we decided to take a nap and attack midtown later that evening. Not much sleep was gotten, but I can’t really complain. After all I was in New York City, at least SOME sacrifices had to be made.

Obviously nothing interesting has gone on in my life since I returned, so I'll keep posting sections of this as I write them.