Our family hasn’t gone on a trip like this since… well, the last time we moved. When we packed our bags and left California for my current city of residence on all my legal papers, Ohio, we were going on an eight day journey, filled with wonderful sights and places to visit.
[Tangent: I realize now... that the places I've been and the things I've seen are kinda biased to the nature. I think it's because my dad enjoys the mountains and nature in general... hmm.]
Little did I remember what I actually did on the trip. We have pictures to commemorate what happened, and I have all these postcards and doodads from places we’ve been, but I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have. I remember sleeping a lot.
However, I’m still extremely thankful I had that journey. Sequoia, Yellowstone, Arches, Mount Rushmore… I think those were the big sights.
This Thanksgiving, I think I got a feel for some of those missed experiences. I had the privilege of driving most of the trip, which would help me understand how incredibly ginormous this country is. This was one aspect of travel that I didn’t know until I was behind the wheel.
I’m used to driving long distances, back and forth from Champaign to Cincinnati (Number FOUR since the school year began), and so this isn’t a big deal. But I still dread the fact that I have to drive for 4 hours straight. After this Thanksgiving trip, a couple hundred miles seems like nothing. That, and driving in Chicago. More on this later.
For this trip, I drove from east of the Pennsylvanian border to Philadelphia, which was an exciting 3 hour trip. There was fog, it was raining slightly, and it was a mountain road. Man, was this stressful in an SUV with 6 people in the back. I never had to hold on so tightly on the wheel to make sure that everyone didn’t feel sharp turns I was making at breakneck speeds… I wasn’t driving too fast, but I guess I wasn’t comfortable with the Ford Explorer and the high center of gravity.
After a short meal with my grandparents, uncle’s, and aunt’s family on my mom’s side, we went to sleep, for it would be a long day in NYC on Friday.
I drove from Philly through NJ by the way of the Turnpike (the worst exit numbering scheme ever… why don’t they just do it with the mile numbers…) and then headed into one of the busiest traffic I’ve ever faced. Now, it was the day after Thanksgiving, and NYC didn’t have as many people working, it was still insanity. Taxi cab drivers… actually, NYC taxi cab drivers… are pretty amazing people. They really are skilled at getting you to places really fast… I guess I just needed to adapt. I don’t even remember the incidents where I felt like I was out of place when it came to driving… This might just be because I’m really tired, and just want to get done with this entry…
Moving on from the subject of traffic, I got to see how the streets were laid out in Manhattan. I loved how there was SOME sanity to it all. Street numbers decreasing as I went south, and alternating streets would be alternating one-way’s. Streets in the ones were the streets that would go North and South (except for 4th… I don’t know… it was 5th, then 3 random street names, Lexington… something and something, and then 3rd), while the ones above 10 (I think… I never hit 10th street… if I remember correctly) were the ones that would go East and West.
Broadway. Wow. This street is HUGE. I think it was a five lane one way going south bound where 7th and Broadway met… TIMES SQUARE, which caught me by surprise, is where these two streets meet.
So what did we actually do in NYC. We just drove around to a lot of places, since parking wasn’t really an option. First was Central Park… and all I could remember was Home Alone 2. This park is gigantic… it covers tens of streets, if I remember correctly. How is it possible… that this park even exists… Then to the “MET”, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (just the outside… I guess it just looked pretty enough for a photo stop). Then the obligatory stop at the Apple Store on 5th avenue, while the Today Show was being filmed at that moment. Then to Korea Town, where we picked up some nice 김밥 (Kimbap) from this tiny, tiny store. Then to ground zero. Then getting lost a little bit, but finding our way back through my superior navigating skills and the usage of the sun (little did I know, the car actually has a built in compass… boo… taking the fun out of everything), and then going for the Harbor Cruise to see the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge. Finally, giving up on visiting Empire State Building as well as NYU due to some heavy traffic, and getting the crap out of Manhattan as fast as possible. We even gave up on visiting Princeton because it was getting late. I have pictures, but I wonder if I’ll have time to put them up.
Screw this, I’m making this a two parter. I’ll write what happened on Saturday later.
But no… I didn’t. Freaking.