Dun-dun-du-na-nuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Welp, I'm up in New York visiting Ryan. So far, the most touristy thing I've done is take pictures of hilarious signs. Everything else has been interesting and fun, but nothing like "Muppets Take Manhattan." The plane ride up, though, was not remotely fun at all.
I got to Greensboro about 3:15, 3:30 for a flight that was scheduled to leave at 5:45. When I got to the counter, the US Air lady said they had a flight scheduled to leave at 3:45 that hadn't left yet because of weather issues at La Guardia and would I like to be on that flight? Well, of course. I'd much rather get there sooner than maybe not at all. So, she printed me up a new boarding pass and set me on my way. Security didn't decide that I looked like a terrorist, so I made it to the plane with plenty of time to spare. Upon boarding, I realized that this was somewhere between a puddle-jumper and a private jet in size. There were 3 seats per row (A, D, and F, for some idiotic reason) with two being clustered together and one by itself. I couldn't actually stand up anywhere in the plane; the ceiling was too low in the passenger cabin, the entry area, and in the coffin of a bathroom (which I found out about later). So, I took my seat, stowed my gear, and was ready to get underway to New York.
The plane, however, wasn't. There was some sort of weather problem over La Guardia, so we were taxied out onto the tarmac and left to sit for a few minutes. Then 45 more minutes. Then another hour. So, we're staring down 2 hours of sitting in a tin can on a strip of thermally-reflective black stuff, crammed in like sardines, with only that little Dust Buster nozzle to move the presumably-cool air around. We're all a little put out at this, especially the massive, hulking figure in the seat next to me. The only things I heard him say the entire flight were expletives. Nothing else. Not "This is some..." or "...ing ridiculous" or anything. Just the expletives. And he was one of the calmer passengers.
So, the pilot finally gargles over the microphone that we're ready to get started. I fought the urge to cheer. So, we get up into the air and head in the general direction of New York State, but I notice that the sun seems to be changing position relative to the craft quite a lot. Now, if I've learned anything from Indiana Jones movies, it means that in a situation like this they're turning around and taking us back to Germany. About this time, the pilot informs us that we're basically doing figure-8s over southern Virginia in some sort of extremely long-distance holding pattern. I assume the storm has become a hurricane centered directly over La Guardia or that the air traffic controllers have somehow spilled coffee on the weather radar. I'm more than half-way through the book that I'd only started the night before, a densely-packed 700-pager, and the rest of the passengers are beginning to look a little manic.
After some indeterminate time spent wasting gas, we're told we're being sent back to Greensboro. If it was possible for passengers to mutiny on an airplane, we would have done so. The pilot admits, as we're landing, that he has no idea what's going on but that someone at the terminal might. Great.
So, I call Ryan. "Guess where I am." "On the ground?" "No. Well, yes. But I'm on the ground in Greensboro again. I'll find out what's going on and call you back."
At the terminal, I have a short list of options: fly to Reagan airport in DC (no freakin' way), fly to Philadelphia (somewhat promising, as it's an hour and a half by car from the City), or come back tomorrow and try one of 3 flights to La Guardia, all at butt-early times when Ryan wouldn't have been able to meet me since he has a job. I call Ryan back and he says it's no problem to drive down to Philadelphia, so I grab a ticket for the flight, manually retrieve my bag from the baggage claim, send it through the security scanner, and hand it to the orange-clad runway jockeys.
This flight is pretty uneventful, until the pilot tells us that we're about 15 minutes out from the airport. So, like a giddy little kid I look out the window to watch the lights pass below me. Except they're kinda far below me for us to be that close to the airport. And we seem to be passing a lot of them. Time furls out and 30 or more minutes pass before I notice I'm seeing some of the same clusters of lights several times. Another bloody holding pattern.
So, after 45 minutes from the supposed 15-minute mark, we finally come in to land at Philadelphia. Once again, I am so overjoyed that I feel like cheering. More than 8 hours after leaving from home, I finally arrive at something relatively close to my destination. So, I ring Ryan to find out that he's a little ways out still, somewhere on the Jersey turnpike. But, fortunately, it took seemingly forever to get my suitcase from the baggage claim. Which buzzed like the strike sound from "Familly Feud."
Ryan managed to pick me up after only a few minutes' wait and we began the not-as-long-as-the-wait-on-the-tarmac-but-still-lengthy trek back up to New York. Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a Burger King in a rest stop named after some historical figure (Molly Pitcher, maybe?) for an incompetently-served burger and fries to keep the gnawing in our stomachs at bay. I hadn't had anything since noon except a bag of pretzels and a couple shot-glass-sized cups of tepid water. But, we eventually made it to Staten Island and across the Verrezanno Narrows into Brooklyn. There was, fortunately, a space right across from his building for SMASHY-2 (his car) so we were able to get up into the building very quickly. And what a welcome sight his couch was. After a fairly quick shower (because I stunk of airports), I was out like a light.
Thursday, I knocked around while Ryan was at work, getting a bite to eat at a local diner (with weird decor and waiters in tuxedo jackets). He has one of the most comfortable keyboards I've ever used and it's bloody ancient. It looks really out of place under his Studio Display.
After Ryan got back in from Manhattan (where he works), we turned around and headed back in to go see a show called "Altar Boyz" in the general neighborhood of Broadway.
It.
Was.
Hilarious.
The basic premise is a Christian boy band's final night of the tour is in New York and hilarity ensues. The songs are excellent parodies and satires and the characters are the perfect kind of one-dimensional that fits into something like this. They're the same cookie-cutter archetypes all those horrid boy bands and I needed oxygen by the end of the show.
So, we go back to Brooklyn for dinner and everything's more closed than we thought it would be. This one restaurant he'd wanted to go to had apparently turned into a smoke-filled bar, so we went back to the same diner I had lunch at. Still fairly tasty.
Friday, I spent the vast majority of the day asleep or trying to be. I had a nasty headache that didn't subside until fairly darn late, somewhere around dinner. Instead of going out, we ordered some dinner from a local place and worked on some of our ideas like "Trailer Park in Space" and the sci-fi thing we're calling "Adam." No, I'm not going to tell you anything about it. We don't have enough done on it to even give people a blurb on it because of what we're hoping to be a complex plot.
Saturday, we spent pretty much all afternoon in the American Museum of Natural History, a museum so big it has its own subway stop. We didn't get to see half of the stuff there, I imagine, but they had the neatest planetarium I've ever seen. It was a huge sphere suspended in the middle of a room with a walkway around it that described the powers of ten using the "If the planetarium sphere is such-and-such..." comparisons. They went all the way from 1020 all the way down to at least 10-15. It was neat! Plus, we got to see a thing on cosmic collisions narrated by Robert Redford (that could have easily been another hour long and still entertaining) and a bunch of dioramas. Everybody loves dioramas!
After that, we meandered through Manhattan, dipped into Central Park long enough to be accosted by a homeless guy, and ate dinner at the Time Warner Omniplex, and did additional meandering in the direction of the Fox News Brown Box building up near Times Square. Fully exhausted by all the effort that went into sweating through my pants, I thought it'd be a good idea to turn in.
Also: Hawkman
Today, I did my first geocache. Initially, it was wholly disappointing because the first two caches we went for were entirely missing. Plus, it was hotter than sin and very humid. Like 90-some. But, then we found one, opened 'er up, signed the little log thing, and got back into the delicious air conditioning of SMASHY-2. Now, we're waiting on some shrimp to finish soaking in some sort of citrus stuff for dinner. And watching "Will & Grace" episodes, courtesy of Bit Torrent.
I got to Greensboro about 3:15, 3:30 for a flight that was scheduled to leave at 5:45. When I got to the counter, the US Air lady said they had a flight scheduled to leave at 3:45 that hadn't left yet because of weather issues at La Guardia and would I like to be on that flight? Well, of course. I'd much rather get there sooner than maybe not at all. So, she printed me up a new boarding pass and set me on my way. Security didn't decide that I looked like a terrorist, so I made it to the plane with plenty of time to spare. Upon boarding, I realized that this was somewhere between a puddle-jumper and a private jet in size. There were 3 seats per row (A, D, and F, for some idiotic reason) with two being clustered together and one by itself. I couldn't actually stand up anywhere in the plane; the ceiling was too low in the passenger cabin, the entry area, and in the coffin of a bathroom (which I found out about later). So, I took my seat, stowed my gear, and was ready to get underway to New York.
The plane, however, wasn't. There was some sort of weather problem over La Guardia, so we were taxied out onto the tarmac and left to sit for a few minutes. Then 45 more minutes. Then another hour. So, we're staring down 2 hours of sitting in a tin can on a strip of thermally-reflective black stuff, crammed in like sardines, with only that little Dust Buster nozzle to move the presumably-cool air around. We're all a little put out at this, especially the massive, hulking figure in the seat next to me. The only things I heard him say the entire flight were expletives. Nothing else. Not "This is some..." or "...ing ridiculous" or anything. Just the expletives. And he was one of the calmer passengers.
So, the pilot finally gargles over the microphone that we're ready to get started. I fought the urge to cheer. So, we get up into the air and head in the general direction of New York State, but I notice that the sun seems to be changing position relative to the craft quite a lot. Now, if I've learned anything from Indiana Jones movies, it means that in a situation like this they're turning around and taking us back to Germany. About this time, the pilot informs us that we're basically doing figure-8s over southern Virginia in some sort of extremely long-distance holding pattern. I assume the storm has become a hurricane centered directly over La Guardia or that the air traffic controllers have somehow spilled coffee on the weather radar. I'm more than half-way through the book that I'd only started the night before, a densely-packed 700-pager, and the rest of the passengers are beginning to look a little manic.
After some indeterminate time spent wasting gas, we're told we're being sent back to Greensboro. If it was possible for passengers to mutiny on an airplane, we would have done so. The pilot admits, as we're landing, that he has no idea what's going on but that someone at the terminal might. Great.
So, I call Ryan. "Guess where I am." "On the ground?" "No. Well, yes. But I'm on the ground in Greensboro again. I'll find out what's going on and call you back."
At the terminal, I have a short list of options: fly to Reagan airport in DC (no freakin' way), fly to Philadelphia (somewhat promising, as it's an hour and a half by car from the City), or come back tomorrow and try one of 3 flights to La Guardia, all at butt-early times when Ryan wouldn't have been able to meet me since he has a job. I call Ryan back and he says it's no problem to drive down to Philadelphia, so I grab a ticket for the flight, manually retrieve my bag from the baggage claim, send it through the security scanner, and hand it to the orange-clad runway jockeys.
This flight is pretty uneventful, until the pilot tells us that we're about 15 minutes out from the airport. So, like a giddy little kid I look out the window to watch the lights pass below me. Except they're kinda far below me for us to be that close to the airport. And we seem to be passing a lot of them. Time furls out and 30 or more minutes pass before I notice I'm seeing some of the same clusters of lights several times. Another bloody holding pattern.
So, after 45 minutes from the supposed 15-minute mark, we finally come in to land at Philadelphia. Once again, I am so overjoyed that I feel like cheering. More than 8 hours after leaving from home, I finally arrive at something relatively close to my destination. So, I ring Ryan to find out that he's a little ways out still, somewhere on the Jersey turnpike. But, fortunately, it took seemingly forever to get my suitcase from the baggage claim. Which buzzed like the strike sound from "Familly Feud."
Ryan managed to pick me up after only a few minutes' wait and we began the not-as-long-as-the-wait-on-the-tarmac-but-still-lengthy trek back up to New York. Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a Burger King in a rest stop named after some historical figure (Molly Pitcher, maybe?) for an incompetently-served burger and fries to keep the gnawing in our stomachs at bay. I hadn't had anything since noon except a bag of pretzels and a couple shot-glass-sized cups of tepid water. But, we eventually made it to Staten Island and across the Verrezanno Narrows into Brooklyn. There was, fortunately, a space right across from his building for SMASHY-2 (his car) so we were able to get up into the building very quickly. And what a welcome sight his couch was. After a fairly quick shower (because I stunk of airports), I was out like a light.
Thursday, I knocked around while Ryan was at work, getting a bite to eat at a local diner (with weird decor and waiters in tuxedo jackets). He has one of the most comfortable keyboards I've ever used and it's bloody ancient. It looks really out of place under his Studio Display.
After Ryan got back in from Manhattan (where he works), we turned around and headed back in to go see a show called "Altar Boyz" in the general neighborhood of Broadway.
It.
Was.
Hilarious.
The basic premise is a Christian boy band's final night of the tour is in New York and hilarity ensues. The songs are excellent parodies and satires and the characters are the perfect kind of one-dimensional that fits into something like this. They're the same cookie-cutter archetypes all those horrid boy bands and I needed oxygen by the end of the show.
So, we go back to Brooklyn for dinner and everything's more closed than we thought it would be. This one restaurant he'd wanted to go to had apparently turned into a smoke-filled bar, so we went back to the same diner I had lunch at. Still fairly tasty.
Friday, I spent the vast majority of the day asleep or trying to be. I had a nasty headache that didn't subside until fairly darn late, somewhere around dinner. Instead of going out, we ordered some dinner from a local place and worked on some of our ideas like "Trailer Park in Space" and the sci-fi thing we're calling "Adam." No, I'm not going to tell you anything about it. We don't have enough done on it to even give people a blurb on it because of what we're hoping to be a complex plot.
Saturday, we spent pretty much all afternoon in the American Museum of Natural History, a museum so big it has its own subway stop. We didn't get to see half of the stuff there, I imagine, but they had the neatest planetarium I've ever seen. It was a huge sphere suspended in the middle of a room with a walkway around it that described the powers of ten using the "If the planetarium sphere is such-and-such..." comparisons. They went all the way from 1020 all the way down to at least 10-15. It was neat! Plus, we got to see a thing on cosmic collisions narrated by Robert Redford (that could have easily been another hour long and still entertaining) and a bunch of dioramas. Everybody loves dioramas!
After that, we meandered through Manhattan, dipped into Central Park long enough to be accosted by a homeless guy, and ate dinner at the Time Warner Omniplex, and did additional meandering in the direction of the Fox News Brown Box building up near Times Square. Fully exhausted by all the effort that went into sweating through my pants, I thought it'd be a good idea to turn in.
Also: Hawkman
Today, I did my first geocache. Initially, it was wholly disappointing because the first two caches we went for were entirely missing. Plus, it was hotter than sin and very humid. Like 90-some. But, then we found one, opened 'er up, signed the little log thing, and got back into the delicious air conditioning of SMASHY-2. Now, we're waiting on some shrimp to finish soaking in some sort of citrus stuff for dinner. And watching "Will & Grace" episodes, courtesy of Bit Torrent.