Maybe most friendships start with a chance encounter... How we met Joyce and Dan was certainly a fluke. We had only been in Toronto for a few weeks, already moved from one dodgy apartment to the next and Jo had found our house in Oakville. We had two nights to kill after moving out of the 2nd apartment before we could get posession of 374 River Glen. So we ended up in the Mariot Residence Inn just around the corner from the Bell Canada offices. The hotel was nice, we had a seperate room for the kids and a kitchenette, but best of all a full buffet breakfast was included for us all. I wandered downstairs for breakfast before heading off to the office, the rest of the family still tucked into beed I think, and noticed a mum (aka Joyce) dealing with her 4 kids over breakfast. I made some comment like 'wow your kids are well organised/behaved, mine would be all over the place [grin]' and that was it. After I left for work Jo ended up meeting up with Joyce again at the hotel pool and they hit it off. Joyce and Dan had already lived in Melbourne for a while several years ago so there was a lot in common and plenty to chat about. I got home after work and Dan lobbed in from his business in town to find that the girls had locked us into a pizza dinner and beer/wine. Safe to say we all got along really well and chatted to the wee hours of the morning. Since we met last October we've been to visit them in Wattsburg, a small town in a farming district near Erie, Pensylvannia and they've come and spent a weekend with us. On that last visit they offered to have our kids for a long weekend should Jo and I want to get away for some time on our own... and so the seeds of a New York city trip were born.
It's important to have a plan, well I like to know basically what I'm doing, although I'm not obsessive about it either. So taking a few days of leave from work we set off on a Thursday morning and headed down passed Niagara, over the border into the US and down the I-90 to Wattsburg. The night before I had been on an IBM/Bell team outting and was a little worse for wear, mostly just tired, which was made worse by the 3.5hr drive. Dan had unfortunately been called OS at the last minute and was visiting England, India and China on a whirlwind 10 day trip, but Joyce was firmly holding to having our kids anyway and going solo. I fear that we weren't much company that evening, I was almost falling asleep over dinner. Next morning we left Joyce with 7 kids and headed back up Lake Erie to Buffalo in New York state and caught our flight to NYC. Well after a 90 minute delay anyway, bad weather in NYC had kept our plane from departing JFK airport so we were already behind schedule. Bad weather? WTF? Now why didn't I check the weather? It's been stinking hot for weeks, a bit of rain but mostly overnight, how could there be bad weather? Well dagnabit a tropical storm was marching up the east coast of the US and was currently hitting NYC pretty hard. Oh well, we were locked and loaded so there was nothing for it and we boarded our flight around 12:30. The JetBlue plane was kitted out nicely, leather seats and personal sattelite TV in the back of each seat. Pretty good given that this was the cheapest flight we could get, US$69 each way.Luckily we weren't further delayed in the air and made it into JFK airport, about 40k's from Manhattan before 14:00. It was cloudy but the air was humid and warm and if it had rained earlier it had all evaporated by the time we caught our pre-booked shuttle bus to our Times Square hotel. The shuttle ride took about 2 hours, we were first on and last off with stops at the beginning at several different airport terminals (JFK has 9!) and then dropping others at about 5 different hotels and locations around Manhattan. Anyway, it started to rain on our trip downtown and despite there being some sites to see Jo and I had stupidly placed ourselves at a window with view blocked by advertising (yeah, we were tired). We caught some glimpses of the Chrysler Building, Empire State and some suspension bridges under a very grey sky on our way in.
The hotel, called The Muse, was located on 46th street just back from 7th Ave and Broadway (the intersection of which is Times Square). A nice little arty hotel very close to the action with a price that wasn't going to break the bank, TripAdvisor.com had some great reviews of it, gotta love net-research. I think it rained the hardest it rained all weekend at exactly the point that Jo and I had to dash from the shuttle and into the lobby :-). The room was a little small and on the 5th floor right on the street (noisy), but Jo and I were glad to be in Manhattan and we watched the rain fall outside our window, looking through the gloom at a stone church and apartment block (complete with those classic NYC fire-escapes) across the street. It was a little later that we had planned on arriving, the flight delay and unexpected 2 hour shuttle ride found us looking for somewhere to eat dinner rather than time to walk and explorer on our first day. Time to start making it up as we went along, while still keeping a list of stuff we really wanted to make sure we did in the back of our minds. We took the hotel supplied umbrella and walked through Times Square. More than a decade ago apparently TS was a dive, lots of strip clubs and dodgy shop fronts, now after the well publicised clean up by the previous major Rudy Giuliani, the square was a clean space, packed with tourists and massive video and light displays. The Square is not a square at all, more like two slim triangles pointing at each other, hourglass shaped really. In NYC the Avenues go North-South and the Streets go East-West, Broadway is the weird one, I guess cos it's the oldest street and pre-dates NYC being turned into a grid, it sort of angles from the upper west side down the the lower east side and so creates lots of wedge shaped blocks as it crosses the grid of avenues and streets. Broadway actually goes from southern Manhattan all the way to the capital of New York State, the city of Albany about 300k's to the north, so it's a long street.Thinking about two important things close to our hearts, shopping and food, we hoped on the subway down to Canal street and walked through Chinatown browsing fake Rolex watches and Asian groceries. We had heard that this was the place to buy 'knock-off' handbags, like Prada etc, and we had heaps of local chinese approaching us like drug dealers whispering 'want bag? Prada, Louis Verton? good price.' We were approached by a fairly harmless chinese woman and decided to say 'yes' so we could check this out. She told us to follow her and we walked down the street and into an alley where we looked at each other and both had the same thought 'where is she taking us and are we gunna get mugged?'. Into a car park now and after being unlocked with her car remote into a Tarago style van with heavily tinted windows. Inside the van the front seat was curtained off with black cloth and the woman spoke something unintelligible into a cellphone quickly. The she locks the doors behind us with the remote... Okay, so know we're a little more than worried... Headline - 'Moronic Aussies in NYC 15 minutes before being mugged by old chinese woman'. Luckily the entire inside of the van is covered with fake gear and she starts pointing out their virtues of the various handbags, purses, sunglasses and watches... we breathe a sigh of relief, might have been a real short trip. Nothing took Jo's eye, all really garish stuff, and we beat a hasty retreat outa there. Glad to be back on the street with our lives and our wallets we started to look for something to eat. We wandered the streets for a while but nothing really looked great so we headed a little further north and found a place in Little Italy. It was drizzling occasionally but the umbrella we were carrying was mostly un-needed and we chose a place on the street but under an awning. The food was not great, we had a fairly tough calimari, then I had veal (ok) and jo had a salad (not so good). Frankly this place wouldn't last on Lygon St, but we probably just chose badly, whatchygunnado? As they say in NYC - Forgetaboutit.
Needing to walk off dinner we made our way back a few blocks west to Broadway and walked all the way back up to Times Sq, about 4-5 k's, Manhattan is a big island. Along the way we stopped in at a few shops, shoes mostly, passed the FlatIron building, saw a few leafy squares, glimpsed the Empire State nicely lit up and, despite the street not being very well lit, felt safe and secure after dark.
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