Day One New York City (2005-11-20)
Day 7 found us in the third and final leg of our trip--New York City. We had breakfast in the hotel before we drove from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham airport. Traffic was relatively light which made my driver happy. We arrived in NY around 5 pm.
Getting a shuttle to our hotel is simple. You just go to the
Ground Transportation Center (just a counter really) and tell the staff
where you want to go. She'll give you a choice of the companies
which go to that area. You then take your pick ( we chose the
cheapest one) and they'll give you a card with all the details and a
number on it. After that you will wait in the seats beside the
counter. When the driver arrives, your number will be called
and you just follow him to the bus. It is an easy and efficient process.
Traffic from La Guardia to our hotel in upper west side was heavy,
and being the last passengers in the group to be dropped off, we didn't
check in to our room until nearly 8 pm. The hotel staff was
indifferent and unhelpful. Our in-room safe didn't work and the
sliding closet door was broken. Luckily the room was clean.
When we had to use the safe in the front desk, the staff wasn't too
happy about it. What can you do when ours didn't work and there's
no way we were walking around in a big city with our passports and
other personal things? We had only been in our hotel for an hour
and I knew I wouldn't be a returning guest.
Since we didn't have many days in NY to sample all the food we wanted, so in order not to waste a meal, we decided not to just grab a bite anywhere but rush to Oyster Bar in Grand Central station, a restaurant on our must-eat list.
We got there just in time at 9:10 pm before they closed the doors to
arriving customers. There were still lots of diners inside the
restaurant who had consumed most of the food on the menu! Our
waiter ran down a LONG list of seafood that was sold out. I
wanted to try their Bouillabaisse, it was out. KL wanted the crab
cake, gone. It was kind of a disappointment. Finally we
ordered a Manhattan clam chowder, some oysters and grilled grouper
cajun style. The food was not worth the price they charge you.
After dinner, we didn't want to linger on the unfamiliar streets and
promptly took the subway home. We waited and waited, but our
train never came. We went back to STUDY the time table and saw a
dotted line in the middle of a block of time from 8 pm to 12 am.
There was no explaination, just some vague wording about ceased service
of some kind. It finally dawned on us that the dotted line meant 10 pm, the cut-off time for our
train service of the day! We then took another train and got off
at the closest station to our hotel. I was cussing and hating the
subway system during our 1-mile hike in the cold to our hotel.
We bit into a tasteless fruit on our first day in the Big
Apple.
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