While I continue to find living in a new city so far from home a challenge, there is one huge advantage: I now live six hours away from New York City — by car! Growing up in Vancouver made it difficult to visit the East Coast without considerable effort, not to mention a great deal of cash for a plane ticket. Now it's just a stone's throw from my front door.
That said, I will concede that it took an entire year of living in Montreal to finally make the trip down south. And the next time I go, I don't think it will be on a long weekend. At least, not one that is celebrated by Canadians and Americans alike. The next time I go to New York it would be nice to actually see a few native New Yorkers rather than slews of goggling tourists all trundling to and from the same landmarks I'm trying to capture with my digital camera.
Friday afternoon rolled around and my boyfriend and I hit the road with the intention of driving most of the way through New York State that evening and then making the rest of the trip Saturday morning so as to arrive bright-eyed and bushy tailed in Manhattan on Saturday morning. Not only was this plan meant to save us some energy, it was also supposed to save us some dollar bills — NYC on the last holiday weekend of the summer ain't cheap.
Alas, it turns out you have to actually book a room somewhere if you want to save any money. Driving into to a town and expecting to find accommodations at 9:30 pm the Friday before Labour Day doesn't work so well. What you will find, however, is row upon row of cat statues, all painted in different fashions, lining the main street — and a surprising number of rowdy men with shaved heads. Welcome to Catskill, NY, where they take the hilarity of their town's name seriously! So seriously that they commissioned an artist to cast several dozen over-sized cats and then used them to punctuate the monotony of a street lined with parking meters.
After stopping at the Catskill ATM and having a brief look around, we decided to keep moving. While the cat statues were causing me to giggle uncontrollably, the skinheads were not. And besides, there was no room at the Comfort Inn due to the annual underwater basket-weavers' convention — or something like that.
We drove a little further and managed to find a little place with a diner and one very expensive room left. The rather frumpy young lady behind the counter informed us that this was a smoking room and then decided that her final selling point would be: "I usually put truckers in there." The room was only free because there had been a last-minute cancellation and we decided there wasn't much hope of finding anything better, so we took it. I'd liken the experience of staying in that room to sleeping in a bowling alley, but hey, we were gonna be in New York the next day!
As we approached the city the next morning, bellies full of McDonald's breakfast, I felt the kind of anticipation I hadn't experienced in nearly a decade — I was about to see a city I'd joyfully experienced time and time again on the big screen, a city that is pretty accurately known as one of the greatest in the world, a city where you can get 15 "I heart NY" T-shirts for $12! It was almost too much to take.
While the Pennsylvania Hotel's staff were unfortunately incompetent, our room had everything we needed (a king-sized bed, an alarm clock with an iPod doc, and a tiny shower with perfect water pressure) and it was steps away from Times Square and pretty much everything else in midtown. In the short time I was there I managed to go shopping, visit a bar featured in Mad Men, see a Broadway show, visit the Brooklyn Brewery, and see almost all of the major landmarks I'd heard of (many stumbled upon by accident). Of course now I have an enormous list of all the things I'd like to do in New York the next time I visit, but that will just have to wait until a later date.
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