Big City, Little City (One)

My summer started, with my expectations of city folk about to be derailed.

Photo: Flickr.com/reivax

I boarded an Amtrak business car (I was on business after all!) at 6 AM, a tad nervous about the trip that lay ahead. By 9:30 the train pulled into Penn Station. I've been in and out of Penn Station before, but never wielding wheeled luggage and a stuffed shoulder tote. Still I maneuvered pretty steadily onto the  up escalator that brought me out of  underground Penn to the city's heavily  shadowed daylight  

I walked ‘bout a half mile up 33^rd Street to Broadway, locating the hotel I‘d booked for the night. Only catch – check-in wasn't until four.  With a suitcase mostly filled with books (I’d be attending the New York Book Festival tomorrow – in the same hotel) and two business-casual-changes folded in the large shoulder tote, taking a bite out of the Big Apple on arrival day wasn't going to be easy. Crowded New York street crossings are not suitcase-on-wheels/stuffed-shoulder-totes friendly. Conventional wisdom told me throngs of city dwellers and workers weren't necessarily friendly on a number of levels, no less on the corners of their congested streets.

But there I stood at the revolving door of the hotel. The doormen looked more business-like than polite as they waved guests in and out of the threshold’s spin-around. Yet, it wouldn't hurt to go in, I thought. I'd ask if there was a place I could leave my baggage until four (even as I questioned how secure is secure behind the front desk of a big city hotel). I waited in line for my turn with a desk clerk. A sympathetic desk clerk I hoped.

“I’m booked here for tonight,” I explained. “I was wondering if you had a place I could –“

“Name,” she interrupted.So much for sympathetic.  

I gave my last name. Almost immediately she followed-up with my first. Then asked for a credit card. Her fingers clicked the keyboard, her eyes glued to the computer screen

“Your room is ready,” she announced.

“Really?” I said. “And I was just hoping to be able to leave my bags some –“

“Christmas in June,” she remarked, then cracked a smile.  “The first elevator will take you up to 18. It’s the highest level,“ she said as she handed me my scan key.

“Even better than Christmas in July,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

I headed for the only elevator that went to the top level, and said a silent prayer there’d be no fire !

(to be continued)

A Cousin Encounter of Another Kind (Three)

(TO SEE PART ONE OF THIS SERIES CLICK HERE)

My wish to return to Brooklyn and actually getting there were two different matters.

Matter #1: Transportation.
Even with a new Gamin GPS (my old Magellan just stopped taking a charge) I was tentative about following a talking compass through New York streets filled with New York drivers. Each and every one of us, I was sure, would be vying for the same parking spot.

My brother passed on going but suggested rail to Penn Station. Then transfers to Brooklyn.

Matter #2: Finding the right time to visit.
 My cousins and I had talked just before Easter. I wanted to finish up my teaching semester – and then put off the mini-odyssey because my daughter was well into her third trimester. She would be moving into a new house in a few weeks. And, we joked, she was getting as big as a house herself. I wasn't going anywhere until my grandson was born.

I finally set the day trip for mid-August, a month after the birth. And then the sciatica kicked in. The sciatica I brought on by putting 1200 miles on my car in two weeks as I drove back and forth to the hospital in Worcester, MA where Patrick was born, and then to his home just south of there.Who knew, moving foot from gas pedal to brake to gas pedal, over and over, would further irritate the inflamed nerve?

The Doctor apparently knew –  as soon as I told him how I'd worn a groove in the I-84 fast lane the previous few weeks. He ordered me off the road -four days at least. And a muscle relaxer.

Finally, a week after Labor Day I set out for Brooklyn. I boarded a 6 A.M. Amtrak train and pulled into Penn Station by 9. I asked a transit worker in uniform to direct me to the N train connection my cousin had said to take.

“You have to go out on the street for the subway entrance.”

Subway? On the street? I thought. This was getting  complicated. Thankfully it was second nature to the police officer on the corner of 33^rd Street and 8^th Avenue who directed me a couple of blocks uptown to a subway entrance.

I was almost there.

(to be continued - one more time!)

CLICK LINK : AN ORBITZ SPECIAL TO END OF YEAR:

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