why not? It's NYC

I spent this past weekend in New York City, having loads of fun.  I was there to see Grace and a little bit of HG and basically get out of town for a few days.

I took the bus down, and let me just tell you how much of a fiasco it was Friday night.  I did a good job (I thought) researching all my options and picking a bus line that was both cost effective and not shady.  I bought my ticket online a few weeks ago, and this company has a progressive ticketing system, so I got my round trip for $24.  Well.... the story is there was traffic Friday night which was delaying everything.  Not entirely surprising, for a Friday evening.  The bus we were scheduled on didn't show up by the time we were scheduled to leave (at 6:30), so they found this spare bus and some guy to drive it, so we took off about 15 minutes late.  Part way to NYC we pulled off the highway into some shady business park area with no explanation.  We ended up at a totally sketchy bus depot that looked more like a place to do a drug deal than to park a bus.  At first we thought we were making a pit stop for snacks or a bathroom break, but that was not the case.

Our driver got out of the bus, met up with this guy, they checked out some maps for awhile, and chattered along, all with no explanation to anyone.  The first driver took off into the unknown, and the new guy took over the driving.  It seems that this new driver didn't exactly know his way to NY, and thanks to the super helpful (read: annoying) girls sitting behind me who kept google mapping the way from where we were, I knew exactly when he took a wrong turn to add another 20 minutes to our route.  It took us a full 5 hours to get to Penn Station, and this was only because one of the passengers directed him where to go after he got lost and calling Boston for directions didn't help at all. 

The icing on the cake of this awesome bus ride, however, was the girl sitting next to me.  The first two hours were totally fine.  She listened to her iPod, she texted from time to time, she read her Twilight book, she tried to sleep.  Well, she got a phone call at that two hour point that set off a chain of drama the likes of which I have not seen in years.  From what I gather, someone got fired or resigned from their job, and somebody was spreading the news.  Somehow, my seat neighbor ended up getting blamed for the spread of this gossip and it took not less than TWELVE impassioned phone calls to everyone she knew to clear things up.  Drama, drama, drama.

I was staying at Grace's sister's apartment in Queens for the weekend, and Alice had sent me very explicit instructions on how to get where I was going once I arrived at Penn Station.  What Alice did no count on, however, was that I would be an hour and a half later than scheduled.  The last hour or so of my bus ride I was getting more nad more frequent phone calls and text messages from Grace and her sister wondering about my status.  So I'm standing at the corner in front of the Madison Square Garden, dragging my suitcase, holding my bags, talking on my phone to assure my friends that I am finally on my way and probably looking more than a little crazy when some guy tried to hand me his cd.  I kept saying "no, no" to him but he wouldn't shut up or stop trying to put the thing in my hand so finally I took it and started to walk away.  Of course he then tried to collect money from me, which I knew would happen, but I was pretty much at the end of my rope at that point so I threw the cd back and him and told him to get the hell away from me.  I finally made it to the appropriate station and boarded the N train to get to Queens.  Only to be kicked off the train one stop later at Times Square because they were doing work on the tracks all weekend, and started at 12:05am Saturday there was a break in service so I needed to switch trains for a portion of the ride.

At about 12:30am I got to Queensboro Plaza, which was where I needed to switch back to the original train line.  At this point Alice and Grace informed me that I should just stay put and they were coming to get me in the car because sitting around waiting for me to get there was driving them crazy.  I finally made it back to Alice's at about 1am, and could not have been happier for my journey to be at an end.

The weekend itself was pretty splendid, it was lovely to see my Grace and play in the city.  I did some pretty good shopping, got to wander around with HG for awhile, and do some touristy things.  Here are a couple of pictures:

The nice man AAA sent to fix our flat tire Saturday morning.  Oh, did I forget to mention that?

 A view of Central Park on our way to brunch Sunday morning

 This mobile art deal HG and I checked out Sunday afternoon

 The view from the subway platform in Queens as I was waiting for the train to head home Monday morning

The ride back was pretty good, I paid $5 to take an earlier bus Monday morning, we arrived in Boston on time, our bus driver was called "Mama T" and she brought snacks for everyone.  How cute is that?  As a bonus, she knew the route and we got there in a reasonable amount of time. 


It was nice to have today off and I'm really not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, but at least it's only going to be a three day week and then another weekend!