New York City
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
Amber and I went to New York this past weekend. It’s the first time either of us have been there, and overall my experience there was very pleasant, though it wasn’t without several hitches.
We left Friday morning. I originally wanted to wake up at 3:30 AM but Amber wanted to sleep in until 5. I managed to negotiate her down to 4, but she wanted to sleep on the side of the bed with the alarm clock, as apparently I couldn’t be trusted. A strange anomaly of Amber and me is that whoever sleeps on the side of the bed next to the alarm clock is the only person who manages to be woken up by said clock. The other person, despite only being 1.5 feet further away, will sleep perfectly soundly. When Amber says I can’t be trusted, what she means is that there have been occasions where I’ll be so tired that I’ll reflexively shut off the alarm clock without being fully awake, and I’ll go back to sleep, thus making us late. It’s a reputation between the two of us that isn’t entirely undeserved, though it should be noted that most of the time I’ve been “unreliable” in this area it’s been when she’s wanted to wake up extra early for our temp jobs, which can suck it as far as I’m concerned. Regardless, the irony of the situation, and I point this out lovingly and in jest, is that Amber didn’t wake up until, at earliest, 4:30 AM, and didn’t wake me up until after she had showered, which was at about 5:20 or so.
So, while I’d originally wanted to leave at 4, but had settled on 5, we didn’t get out of the house until close to 6:30 or so. The sun had already rose, but I did manage to snap off a fairly pretty picture of the sun right before we got on the highway.
I didn’t really have time to set up my camera, as I was sitting at a green light by the time I even got my camera out of its case, still, it’s a decent picture that highlights the morning pretty well.
According to mapquest, it was going to be about an eight and a half hour trip to New Jersey, which is where we were going to stay. Our goal for Friday was to make it to Jersey by noon, and hop a train to NYC and be there no later than two. We planned on doing our sightseeing that day, and going to the non-profit conference the following day. When we got done with the conference, we planned on coming straight home.
Things didn’t go according to plan….
It got off to a shitty start pretty early on. We were only about an hour or two into our trip when the highway went (literally) through a city, complete with traffic lights and turns that weren’t connected to exits. So we decided to get some gas. I’m 95% positive I got back on the highway and headed in exactly the direction I was going before we pulled over, which means something went wrong before we even arrived here. I really have no idea what, and neither does Amber, as neither of us saw any funky signs that would have led us to believe we were going in the wrong direction, but that’s exactly what happened. By the time we knew for sure that everything had gone to hell we were over 50 miles from where we should have been, which meant that, bare minimum, we’d lost two hours.
We’d been traveling purely by mapquest directions up to this point, so we pulled over and got a map. The guy we bought the map from told us to turn around and take some back roads for about 18 miles to get back to the highway we wanted to go to, but I thought I had a better way. We’d been traveling Northeast when we should have been traveling Northwest, as to go around Virginia Beach and Delaware and what not. Well, because we’d gone so far East, trying to get back to the highway was going to be way, way out of our… erm, way. But, like I said, I thought I had a better way. Up through Chesapeake there was a tunnel that connected Virginia to the bottom of Delaware. If we went through that underwater tunnel, we wouldn’t have to travel back west at all and by my calculations we’d have saved ourselves at least 70 miles. It would’ve been a fine plan had I realized just how much city we’d be traveling through. All in all, I probably shaved over a hundred miles off of our trip, but added about three hours because of all the street lights and hard traffic we had to go through. Delaware sucks, by the way. Don’t go there.
About half-way through Delaware we realized we weren’t going to make it to NYC any earlier than 5 PM, and I started to think about revising our plans. I proposed to Amber that we ought to stay an extra day, and spend Sunday sightseeing around New York while we spent whatever time we’d have left Friday in Jersey just relaxing.
I don’t even quite remember what time it was when we finally arrived in Jersey. It was close to 6, maybe 7 PM though.
If Delaware sucked, I don’t even have words for how shitty of a place New Jersey is. There’s a lot of famous people who hold great affinity for Jersey, but I’d wager a guess they weren’t talking about the shitpool Newark. What a piece of crap that city is, and the surrounding area for that matter. The streets aren’t properly labeled, some aren’t labeled at all, the roads are torn to shreds and everything is falling apart. Worse, if you think it’s difficult to make a left-handed turn in Raleigh, try fucking Jersey, man. I literally went 2 miles completely unable to make a U-Turn, with a sign posted literally every 50 feet to remind me that U-Turns were illegal. I can’t even count on one hand how many times I had to travel MILES out of my way because of this poorly designed city.
It took us forever to find our hotel, and when we did, they let us know that we could only have the room for the one night we booked it, we were screwed for Saturday night. So we spent a good while trying to find a new hotel so we could stay until Sunday.
The Hotel sucked, by the way. The bed wasn’t very comfortable, the TV was smaller than my computer monitor (21-inches), we had to call room service to get them to activate our phones so that we could make outside calls, they didn’t do wakeup calls so we had to rely on a single alarm clock, they only had two fairly thin pillows on the bed, which meant Amber and I had to fold ours in half in order to get any kind of head support at all…. The shower curtain was only a thin piece of cloth that hung on the outside of the tub, which meant whether you put it inside or outside, the floor was getting soaked, and the tub was terribly small, crushing for two people.
Quite possibly worst of all, we were less than a mile away from the airport, and we were directly underneath where the planes were taking off, which meant every 15 minutes or so we’d hear an enormous thunder like the Gods were at war with each other.
All this was made ours for the reasonable price of nearly 150 dollars. Three times as much as an equivalent hotel here in Raleigh, but whatever. We went out to eat at a Ruby Tuesdays, to which we were entertained by very attractive hostesses and waitresses, and got to listen to all the Jersey accents. Nearly everyone sitting around the bar in there looked like they could fit in easily in an episode of The Soprano’s, which probably sounds more racist than it is.
The following day we made our way to the train station. We had a hell of a time finding a garage to park in, and we wound up parking in a place that cost 20 dollars a day. Pretty steep, I had found places online that offered the same for only 13 or less, but we were running slightly behind so we just went for it. We pulled up to the valet, I got my ticket and we hopped on the train to NYC.
It was pretty cool when we got there, but it was very, very warm, even as early as it was, and it was only like 7:45 in the morning. We had to walk about 1.5 miles to the building we were to have the conference at, and we only had about 45 minutes to get there. More than enough time, but it does mean keeping a pace and not relaxing much. When we arrived, my back was completely sweat soaked, my shirt was drenched, and I spent probably 10 minutes in the bathroom drying myself off with paper towel and using the same stuff to try and dry off my shirt. It didn’t work, but I was embarrassed, so I put on my leather jacket and risked sweating even more.
Thankfully, breakfast was being served to about 40 people and I managed to sit on an air conditioning vent, which blew wonderfully cool air up the back of my shirt. It took about 20 minutes, but when I checked my shirt again it was completely dry and I felt good. Or mostly good. I had run out of hair gel Friday, which meant Saturday my hair was a poofy mess. I had planned on buying more Friday in New York, but since we never made it to New York that day my hair would just have to do. Oh well!
The conference went well, and I’m sure Amber will talk about it at length in her own livejournal so I’ll spare going into detail about it. Suffice it to say it was enjoyable, though to be perfectly honest I don’t know that it would have been worth all the money and hassle we put into the trip if we hadn’t spent a full day in New York just sightseeing. It was enjoyable and informative, and even inspiring, but worth 350+ dollars? Eh…. One plus side is that they gave away Student Editions of Microsoft Office, so I’ve got a fresh 2007 edition of MS Word, which is kind of nice, but I’m coming to find that the Student edition doesn’t seem to save well to any format other than itself, which kind of makes me think I’ll be sticking with my Open Source OpenOffice Writer. Oh well.
During breakfast, I realized one extremely bad thing. I forgot to give my car key to the valet. This wasn’t good, as Amber and I had no idea WTF was going to happen to it. I tried calling them (the ticket they gave me had their number on it), but all I got was automated nonsense giving me office hours and locations and shit.
Thankfully, when we got back to the car it wasn’t a problem. They had a tow truck on hand, so they must’ve towed our car into a spot. We thought it was going to be a huge problem but it wasn’t. I tipped the valet 5 dollars as a sort of tribute to the karma gods I don’t believe in, and we went off to find our second hotel.
It was the biggest bitch in the world to find, and was probably the most frustrating experience of the entire trip (that I can think of). When we originally got the directions, we were told that it was a 5 minute drive from the train station we were located at. It took us over ninety minutes to get there. Why? Because the stupid fucking place was literally off the highway. As in, there’s a major fucking highway, and instead of having a proper exit where you’re capable of slowing down and shit and spotting a thousand feet away with enormous signs, there’s just a sudden turn with no real visible signs whatsoever directly off the highway like it were just any fucking street, and it’s only accessible after making two U-Turns off of other exits on the highway. I can’t even fully explain just how completely fucked up the situation was, but we finally got official written directions from another hotel of the same brand, and despite the fact that the two hotels (the one we got the directions from and the one we were trying to get to) were less than a mile apart from each other and were both off of the same highway, the directions were a full page long.
When we finally got there, the hotel was about 30 dollars more expensive than the previous hotel but at least twice as good. Lots of plush pillows, a decently-sized TV with a lot of channels, a good tub, everything was better. We ordered Chinese, I scarfed down two full meals worth because I hadn’t eaten a whole lot at the conference, and then we went to bed.
One thing I forgot to mention was that on the walk back from the conference building in NYC to the train station, it began to POUR. The rain was extremely thick, and within minutes the streets were flooded. Amber and I had brought a large umbrella, but the rain was so powerful that our legs from about the lower-thighs down were completely drenched. Hell, to be perfectly honest we were pretty much wet head-to-toe, but our shoes and pants got the worst of it. Thankfully we both had a second pair.
This is relevant because at the hotel Saturday night, we saw on the weather channel that while on Friday there was only a 30% chance of rain, and on Saturday there was a 50% chance, Sunday had an enormous 70% chance. This was not boding well for our trip back to NYC Sunday. Despite this, we were resolved to go.
Sunday morning we woke up and went to the hotel cafeteria where we got breakfast. I piled on the bacon and eggs and ham and sausage and everything, while Amber took an extremely modest breakfast of like two strawberries, a half strip of bacon and maybe one egg worth of scrambled eggs. We thought it was complimentary, but the guy informed us that it was 14 dollars EACH. Looking down at my enormous plate, and looking over at Amber’s half-fist full of food, I was shocked and appalled and angry. I told the guy I had no idea it was going to cost so much, I told him I thought it was free. I told him there was no prices listed anywhere in the cafeteria and that there was no reason I should have thought it cost money. The guy talked with a very thick accent and neither Amber or I really had any idea what he said, but we sat down and ate. He either had told us that it was okay and we could have the meal free of charge, or that since we got the food we had to pay either way.
So we ate.
There’s an end to this story that I think is kind of funny and exciting in my otherwise boring existence, but I’m not terribly sure Amber would be pleased at me talking about it, so I’ll just leave you to infer based on the silence of what happened next.
We took the train to New York, this time I was sure to give the valet the key.
And hey, New York was great. We walked all the way through Times Square and spent about three hours in Central Park.
We saw a man make out with a fish he’d just caught in the lake (literally about the making out), but like a fool I managed to miss taking his picture. It wasn’t until we started walking back to Times Square from Central Park, after probably 5 hours having been spent in the city that it began to rain. Though when it began to rain, it really poured, worse than it had the day before.
We ducked into a Rockstar Cafe (or whatever they’re called) and spent 40 dollars on a pair of hamburgers, but they were good and it was decent refuge from the rain so I guess it was worth it.
After that we decided we didn’t want to risk the poor (pour?) weather anymore and decided to get back to the train and head home. It was half way on our walk back that something happened that really skewed our image of New York.
Up until this point New York was actually really pleasant. Sure, we saw homeless people. Sure, there was trash everywhere and a lot of places smelled kind of bad. But it was a big city, so all that’s to be expected. What wasn’t expected is that nobody had asked us for money. On the trip four years ago, every big city we went to we were constantly badgered for money. In San Francisco, we were practically mauled by mobs of beggars. But in New York, despite having walked for hours on two separate days, the only person who had asked us for money was one guy Amber initiated dialog with who had set up his own booth to raise money, supposedly to help homeless people who had become homeless after they’d been laid off from good office jobs. The guy seemed fishy to me, and this was exacerbated when the guy started preaching about disasters like Katrina and Global Warming were God’s way of punishing the USA for outsourcing to India or some shit like that. It started to click that this was just a scam for this guy’s own personal funds when he started making up random figures, like how the floods in China killed billions of people, and how Katrina killed billions of people. By the time he threw out a few more devastating figures our way I’d estimated that the population of the Earth was at close to 14 billion people. When he asked for money, I passed.
Despite this guy’s scam, he was harmless - even clever. But not very intrusive. Not a big deal. But that changed with the guy we ran into (literally) on the way back to the train station Sunday.
We were just walking down the sidewalk when a guy literally runs into me, shoulder-to-shoulder. My very first instinct when this happened was that the guy had ran into me intentionally. The sidewalk, while crowded to normal standards, wasn’t very dense to New York standards and there was just no reason this guy and I had to have run into each other unless we weren’t paying attention - and I had been. I was walking in a straight line, and one second before he ran into me, he hadn’t been directly in front of me. Even so, my mind was somewhat scrambled when I heard the sound of glass breaking on the sidewalk at our feet. When I looked down, I saw a small paper bag half-torn with what appeared to be broken fragments of an alcohol bottle. The fact that the bag wasn’t soaked made me realize immediately that it was an empty bottle. The bag’s opening was firmly twisted shut, and the only reason I was able to see inside the bag was because the side of it had torn open. Even though only a second had gone by, none of this felt right.
When I looked up at the guy’s face, he seemed pissed. I apologized to him, and then grabbed Amber’s hand and began walking away from him. About five seconds later he started calling after me.
“Hey! Hey!” he shouted at my back. “Hey!”
I turned around after he called after me several more times and I realized he was running up to us. By this time I had played the images in my head back and I was pretty sure that the broken bottle had been broken several times already. This wasn’t the first time it had been broken, which automatically led me to believe that this guy was running a scam on me. A scam he’d run on other people.
But what am I to do, in a situation like this? When he approaches he starts talking about how I broke his property, but he never mentions what the property is, nor does it seem to be in his hands anymore. I can smell the alcohol on his breath, and the way he’s so forceful about all of this, and the way he gestures with his hand as he says: “That’ll be ten dollars, cough it up,” just completely reinforces the idea that this is a scam he’s run a hundred times before. There’s nothing about this guy that seems genuine.
“Hold on!” he shouts behind me. He points in that direction, the direction he had been originally coming from. “Just go on to the party without me. I’ll only be a minute!”
I turn to look to see who he’s shouting at. There’s lots of people on the street, even a couple people looking at us (he’s making quite the scene), but he’s not actually shouting to anybody who’s actually there. As I look off to try and see who these imaginary people are, he tries to divert my attention back to him with a few snaps of his fingers and a few more ‘Hey!’’s. If these people did exist, it would be highly suspect as to why he’d be telling them to head South to the “party” when he originally ran into me while traveling North.
If I knew this guy were stable, I’d call him out on the scam. I’d ask to see the “property,” or I’d simply roll my eyes and walk away, telling the guy to forget it. But the dude’s obviously drunk, and he’s bigger than me and everything about his tactics show me that he’s trying to intimidate me. If I fight hostility with hostility I really have no idea if that’ll work out well for me or if he’ll get violent. So I lie to him and tell him I don’t have a cent on me. He lowers his price to five dollars, getting even more forceful with it, but also beginning to sound more and more like a beggar and less and less like somebody who’s actually concerned with his personal property.
Thankfully, it only takes about twenty seconds worth of telling this guy I have nothing to give him that he gives up with a labored “Maaannn…” and turns away from me and walks away. Amber and I walk away from him, and Amber points out that he totally dashed her image of New York for her. I feel the same way.
But maybe it’s for the best. We’d been taking the less savory-looking people as a bit of harmless character that added to the vibe of New York, which maybe made us take less seriously just how dangerous it could be. Which isn’t to say that we were necessarily in any danger from this guy, but I think we started taking things a bit more seriously from there on.
The rest of the trip was mostly uneventful. We made it home in about 10 hours, which is decent time considering all the rest stops. We were very tired, and for the last 2 hours or so I’d been driving and was so exhausted there were times I felt like I might pass out. The rain was pretty terrible for the first hour or two of the trip home, which made traffic travel extra slowly and made us fear for our lives. But it was okay.
All in all, I give our trip a solid 7 out of 10. Money was a major factor in this. Next time we go, instead of having 600 dollars between the two of us and only three days to spend up there, which includes the 45 hours or so of that time we’d be sleeping or driving (giving us only about 27 hours of wakefulness), we’re gonna have 2-3,000 dollars and about a week to spend up there, with no major engagements that detract from our ability to take in the city of New York. Furthermore, instead of driving and staying in Jersey, relying on the train to take us back and forth, we’ll fly and sleep directly in the city. Pricey? Sure, yes, of course. But really necessary to my sanity. All the driving and train riding and shit suuuucked.
Still, even so, it was a good trip, and I really enjoyed myself. So, uh, yay to that. Or something.