Escape to New York

 In a former life, wifey and I were frequent visitors to New York City.  We'd travel there 3 or 4 times per year, mostly to see Broadway shows, but also to partake of all the culture in a large metropolitan center- museums, parks, shopping, dining, and all that.  We really grew to like the city and became comfortable moving around in it.  On our last trip over the first weekend of March 2020, however, there were already rumblings of a looming disaster.  Cases of a new disease that would come to be called Covid had been detected in nearby Westchester county the weekend we were there.  But we largely did our usual thing- travelled by subway, ate indoors at restaurants, and went to movies and Broadway theater.  We saw a very fine production of The Lehman Trilogy at the Nederlander Theater which starred Adam Godley, Ben Miles, and Simon Russell Beale.  In fact, we saw the first performance of the show in previews on March 7, 2020.  We flew home Monday the 9th.  And by Thursday the 12th, the show had closed and the city of New York began lockdown.  The global pandemic had begun.

The rest, as they say, is history.  It was a couple years before the country would begin to emerge from the pandemic limitations, and longer yet before wifey and I would travel.  But more than four and a half years later, we return to New York, eager to resume where we left off.  This time, we travel as part of a group from UAB, with the purpose of attending the UAB-Army football game at West Point, NY on Saturday.  But we'll have time to do some familiar things in Manhattan as well.  In preparation for the trip, we got the most recent Covid and flu vaccine booster shots, and eagerly look forward to the adventure.

Alas, the cynic in me always points out that air travel in the USA is reliably a hot mess.  I can't remember any of our NYC trips ever going completely smoothly and according to schedule.  This one was no exception, right off the bat.  Past experience had taught us to book non-stop flights after many missed connections.  But since we were part of a tour group, we had no say in the arrangements for this trip.  Our journey was to have two legs on American Airlines: from Birmingham to Washington DC, a 90 minute layover, then on to New York Laguardia.  We were all seated and buckled in for an on-time departure from BHM when the pilot came on the speaker to tell us there was a mechanical problem with the airplane and we'd have to de-plane for repairs to take place.  The problem? A broken armrest on one of the seats. With this inauspicious beginning, we all got off the plane and waited in the gate area.  While we waited, we heard over at the adjacent gate that their inbound plane would have to be taken out of service, as there had been an "event" in flight and all the overhead oxygen masks had been deployed.  So those passengers were out of luck as their plane would be unusable.  Could be worse for us, or so I thought.  The seat "repair" (a mechanic simply duct taped the armrest out of the way and put a sign on the seat saying it was not to be used) was quickly finished, and so we all re-boarded the plane, sat down and buckled up.  Then we waited.  And waited.  No info from anyone while we waited as our layover in DCA ticked away.  After nearly an hour of waiting on the hot, stuffy plane, we departed and were headed to DCA at last.

We landed with what seemed like just enough time to reach our connecting plane at Reagan Airport.  But with great cruelty, American Airlines wouldn't make it quite so easy.  We landed, then waited and waited for a gate assignment so that we could get off the plane.  Once we finally did, it was, naturally, a gate far from our connecting flight. So we ran (or as close to running as I can manage these days) and reached the NYC bound plane with mere minutes to spare.  Finally!   This flight departed on-time and the rest of the short journey to NY was smooth and on schedule.

It was a beautiful, sunny, cool Autumn day as we landed at LaGuardia Airport, which had been an absolute dump in the midst of a major remodeling the last time we had been there.  Now, it is actually rather nice: modern, clean, and reasonably well laid out.  It also seems a bit bigger- we had a long walk to baggage claim and then the group bus that took us to our Times Square hotel.  But at last, we arrived at The Knickerbocker Hotel, our base of operations for the next few days.  We checked in to the very nice room, then went to the St. Cloud rooftop bar for a Martini, supposedly invented here at the Knick.  Our first day of travel was complete, and we are back in Manhattan at last, after four and a half years.