What Happened In New York

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Before I get into the New York stuff, I just wanted to announce that today, for the first time, I not only finished the daily Express crossword puzzle, but I also completed the Hard-level Sudoku! Double-whammy! Game over, Express!

And now back to our regularly scheduled trip write-up:

It's hard to believe that tomorrow, it will already have been a week since Gerritt and I started out on our grand weekend trip to NYC. It's also been a week since the snowstorm blew in last Friday morning, which made it interesting trying to get to the train station. The Metrobus, which has never been reliable for me so far, was running about an hour behind schedule. I ended up walking halfway to the Metro stop, striking up conversations with other people waiting at bus stops a bit further down the road, and no one really seemed to know what was going on. I finally rested somewhere down Blake Lane, chatting with a woman who was late getting to work, when the bus arrived and trucked us on to the Metro.

Gerritt and I ended up probably breaking a lot of Amtrak rules during our train experiences. Our tickets were from Alexandria to the Big Apple, but by Friday morning, our train was running three hours late. We figured we'd give Union Station a shot. Maybe they'd have an earlier train. They didn't, but we managed to finagle our way on board at the station, with the help of some employees, rather than having to try getting back to Alexandria in time to catch it there. On our way back, instead of waiting for 30 minutes at Union Station, then riding to Alexandria to disembark, we sidled up the escalators while the train switched engines and other passengers took a smoke break. Nobody seemed to notice or care too much. Excellent.

As for New York itself, I want to thank Daryl for hosting us and being our tour guide one more time. (I'll be waiting for your Misinformation Guide to be published, and I'll be sure to buy a copy.) During our stay, we checked out a couple of restaurants around Daryl's Park Slope neighborhood, went shopping in SoHo, visited the Museum of the City of New York (which had a very informative movie detailing the city's history), saw a laser show at Grand Central Station, and went to a service at Daryl's church (where we saw a traditional ceremony involving Santa Lucia and singing in Swedish - I'd explain it, but it's best that you check it out for yourselves). And, of course, the centerpiece of Saturday night was the DMB show at Madison Square Garden, which featured an excellent set and Robert Randolph as a guest on the fiery steel guitar. It may have been the best Dave show I've seen, and as you might know, I've been to quite a few. All of the shindigs involved a lot of walking, of course, but it was an action-packed weekend, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Other firsts from the weekend included eating in the Amtrak dining car and dodging Daryl's deadly tie-catching paper shredder. Check out the pictorial!