Write From Karen

We slept well in New York, despite the fact that there is an infestation of bed bugs (and many other places, apparently). We were first clued in to the bed bug problem by all of the ads for getting rid of bed bugs on TV. Though we know what bed bugs are (sort of), it never dawned on us that it could become such a problem that an entire city had to advertise to get rid of them. They hang out in hotels and snuggle down into suitcases so that the unsuspecting traveler inadvertently takes them home with them.

You can imagine how that could quickly become a country-wide problem.

But so far, it looks like we left those critters back in New York – at least no one has come forward with tiny little bites all over their body.

One night, we were woken up at 3:00 in the morning by loud pounding. You’d be hard pressed to NOT find any sort of construction going on in New York and our street was no exception. In fact, a few doors down, they had imploded a building (not while we were there), and were working on building it back from the ground up. WHY they were working at 3:00 in the morning is beyond me, but it was very annoying to wake up to. Seven o’clock in the morning I can understand, but three o’clock in the morning?? Listen here New York, YOU may not like to sleep but WE do!

Other than that, Kevin and I slept fine. Dude and Jazz, on the other hand, didn’t get much sleep. One was always kicking the other or hogging covers so they spent the majority of the night trying to find comfortable positions or silently cursing each other.

Because Kevin had only been walking for three weeks and really couldn’t physically handle a lot of activity, we purposefully kept our itinerary low key. I really wanted to see the Statue of Liberty and Central Park and Kevin really wanted to see Times Square, so we made plans to try and squeeze those things in.

We decided to go to the Staten Island Ferry first. (If I had known our cruise boat would sail right past The Statue of Liberty [in fact, it got a lot closer than the ferry did] we would have skipped this activity all together. Ah, for the gift of foresight).

But we needed to find a way there. I didn’t want to spend half our vacation budget on taxis, but I wasn’t sure if Kevin would be able to handle the subway, mainly the stairs down into the subway. So, we asked the front desk if there was a handicap accessible entrance anywhere close and luckily, there was one one block away. We used the elevator to get down into the subway, purchased our Metro cards and waited for our train to arrive.

Now, we have some experience with subways from our trip to Washington D.C. a few years back, so we knew what to expect. And to my surprise, the cars weren’t all that crowded (but filled up fast around rush hour). And we easily navigated the subway routes while we were there, though not all of our stations had an elevator for Kevin. So he ended up navigating way more stairs than we thought he would have to. But as usual, he handled his discomfort like a champ.

The ride out to Staten Island was quite long. We must have gone through close to ten stops before we reached the one we needed. As usual, there was a lot of construction going on, so it was noisy and a bit congested as people had to walk around it, but we entered the HUGE building. There weren’t that many people there (though it filled up close to the time another ferry was scheduled to arrive) and Kevin had a chance to sit down and take a load off while we waited for the ferry.

We waited about thirty minutes, boarded the ferry and started making our way across the harbor.

I actually ended up on the wrong side of the ferry (the Statue of Liberty was on the other side), and it was so crowded that I didn’t even try and make it – I would just make sure I was on that side on the way back. In the meantime, we spent a relaxing fifteen minutes or so admiring the New York skyline.

We made it to Staten Island, read a little about it’s history, grabbed some hot dogs wrapped in pretzels and then caught another ferry on the way back to Manhattan.

This time, I made sure I could see the Statue of Liberty.

A myriad of emotions washed over me when I finally saw her: pride, freedom, accomplishment, strength, confidence, hope … it was amazing. There is just something … awe-inspiring about actually seeing the Statue of Liberty. She’s beautiful and it was interesting to watch people gaze at her. The boat got quiet as we passed her and you could almost reach out and touch American Patriotism.

It wasn’t nearly as crowded on the ride back and we sat back and enjoyed the cool breeze.

We got back on the subway and rode uptown toward Times Square.

Though there were more people on the subway by this time, they were surprisingly quiet. I guess I was expecting there to be a lot of chatter, but there wasn’t, everyone kept to himself/herself. And it was interesting to see the number of people who offered Kevin a seat, which we thought was really nice (of course, I later found out that they are required to give up their seat if a disabled person is in the vicinity – it’s the law. So … even though I’m sure they were being nice, I’m also sure they were sort of forced to be nice).

We arrived at the Times Square stop, walked up the stairs and out into pure chaos.

It was loud.

It was noisy.

It was crowded.

It was completely overwhelming.

I felt like I was in a movie – I turned around and kept being bombarded by over stimulation. There was so much to see, so much to hear, so many people pressing in on us from all sides – it was insane.

The boys almost immediately shut down. I’m pretty sure they frowned the whole time we were in Times Square. They didn’t care for it, at all. Kevin was fascinated.

We didn’t stick around Times Square too long, Kevin was starting to get really tired so we headed back to the blessed quiet of our hotel room.

We stuck around the hotel room and rested until rush hour was over, then we walked a few doors down from our hotel to a quaint cafe to eat dinner.

Even though Kevin didn’t complain, I could tell that our day had taken a lot out of him, poor guy. So, I told him the next day we would take it easy on him.

Unfortunately, I lied.

(… to be continued)

Though I’ve always wanted to go to New York, we hadn’t planned on going to New York quite so soon. All we really wanted to do was catch a boat out of the New York harbor and sail to Canada for a few days.

But, since we were planning on cashing in our frequent flyer miles (not a sponsored link – calm down) in on four free (well, we paid $10 bucks a piece for tax and then we paid $20 bucks a piece for our two bags) flights, our fly options were limited. Even though I understand why American Airlines does this (after all, they’re flying us for free – why would they reserve prime-time money-making flights for us?), it’s still a bit annoying that we only have a narrow window of opportunity to work around.

But hey, I’m grateful they even HAVE this program, let alone still running it after Obama’s “hope and change” crap he’s pulled since being in office, so I am not going to complain; the program has saved us boo-coo bucks over the years. (I mean, you’re going to buy/pay for stuff anyway [groceries, utilities, etc], why not earn points why you do it? Just be sure and pay it off at the end of the month so you’re not paying interest. If you can’t pay it off, then don’t charge it. Just sayin’.)

Anyway, since we were cashing in our points, our options were limited as far as when we could fly out to New York. I have learned, from our 10th anniversary cruise, that I will NEVER AGAIN fly out and try to catch a boat on the same day. It’s WAY too stressful. So, ever since then, we’ve made a point of flying out at least one day ahead of time so if there are any delays, we won’t miss the boat.

So to speak.

The closest time we could get to New York and still make our boat was two days. So, we thought, “hey, we’re going to be in New York anyway, let’s just splurge on a hotel room and hang out in New York for two days.”

And that’s what we did.

We started planning this trip back in January of this year. January has become our “vacation planning” month. We plan, book and by the time vacation time rolls around, it’s paid for. The only money we have to dish out is last minute expenses.

Only this year, Kevin had his accident in April and suddenly, we weren’t sure what to do about our pre-paid vacation. Though we had purchased insurance on our cruise (which sounds like a waste of money, but something you’re REALLY GLAD you have in case something comes up and you might not make it, like we did), we hesitated on canceling it. The accident happened in April, our vacation wasn’t until July – that’s a lot of time to heal and get back to normal. Since the doctors were confident that Kevin would walk again, we remained optimistic.

We oscillated between taking the vacation and canceling the vacation. I had doubts, but I left it up to Kevin on whether he wanted to cancel or not – it all depended on what he felt like doing and what he could handle.

Obviously, he decided to wait it out and we ended up going.

I was a little worried about getting him through security.

I needn’t have worried. Though he did indeed set off the alarms in the Springfield airport, that was largely because he was wearing his leg brace. Why do I know this? Because when we went through airport security in Newark, NJ, he wasn’t wearing his leg brace and the alarms didn’t go off; he sailed through without a second glance. (Though we did have to put his cane and his walker through the x-ray machine).

Our flight up to New York went off without a hitch. Everything was on time and we arrived in New York at 6:30.

We hailed a taxi. Though I had read a lot about New York taxi drivers and that was enough to make me nervous using them, I was so concerned about getting all of our luggage, Kevin’s walker and Kevin himself settled into the car that I didn’t give myself time to really BE nervous. We ended up having to put the walker in the backseat – me, Dude and Jazz had to hold it on our laps, which was uncomfortable and cramped, but we dealt with it.

Since I was sitting in the backseat, I couldn’t see. And it’s a good thing. Because every hair-raising story you’ve heard about New York taxi drivers weaving in and out of traffic and getting within inches of the surrounding cars are absolutely true. I would NEVER survive driving in New York. I’d be a bumbling basket case, even more so than I am now.

We arrived at The Salisbury. Since we had used Google maps at home and saw what it and the street looked like, there were no surprises; it was exactly what we expected.

The bellman took our luggage up to room 611. We had read reviews of the place on hotels.com (in fact, we booked our hotel through them – recommend them, by the way), and one of the complaints were the slow elevators.

They weren’t kidding. There were only two elevators for 15 floors and yes, they were slooooow. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me, we would just take the stairs. But since Kevin doesn’t do stairs very well, we were forced to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

The hallways were also really, really hot and stuffy. I don’t know if the hotel was trying to save money on their utility bill or what, but it was unbearable, especially in the afternoon after the building had had a chance to bake all day. (New York in July is HOT and STIFLING).

However, that is the extent of anything bad I have to say about The Salisbury – everything else was great. We had our own window unit, so our room stayed nice and cool (in fact, I was amazed to see just how many buildings in New York had window air conditioners – I guess this is because most of the buildings in New York are so old they may not even HAVE central air installed). The hotel is indeed old, but it was clean and we loved the location!! There was an entrance to the Metro just one block away and Central Park was literally around the corner. There was a coal-oven pizza place next door (they have since outlawed coal ovens so it was cool that we were so close to one and could sample a coal-oven pizza), and a quaint cafe that we ended up going to several times while in New York.

We couldn’t have asked for a more centrally located hotel. (I’d recommend staying there – though I forgot to mention that though The Salisbury advertises a continental breakfast, you don’t figure out, until they drop off the voucher that you are required to give them if you want the breakfast, that the continental breakfast? Is $6.00 PER PERSON. Twenty-four bucks for doughnuts and bagels?! Yeah, we did that exactly ONCE).

(Side note: We had pizza the first night we were there and I took one bite and burned the ever-loving CRAP out of my lower lip because the cheese was so hot. My lip was numb throughout the rest of our trip. )

We didn’t do much our first night in New York. We arrived, got settled, ate some famous New York pizza and crashed. But we had been in New York long enough for me to understand what people meant when they said NY was the city that never slept. The energy was nearly palpable. I felt small, insignificant, lost, overwhelmed, and naive.

But I was already hooked and couldn’t wait to see more.

(…to be continued)