Friday, the second full day of our NYC adventure, began with the sort of intense muscle soreness that only those who live in commuter cities and don’t exercise enough can truly understand. For my part, I understand if your cup doth not run over for our plight. Stiff legs aside, we set off for Brooklyn via the bridge of the same name.

After marveling at a truly impressive feat of 19th-century engineering (seriously—they used glorified diving bells to put the supports in place under the East River, which is really hardcore), we descended into the subway system again.

After the previous day’s subway (mis)adventure, I figured I had this whole public transportation thing down. I was wrong. For reasons I still don’t understand, it was announced that our train would be skipping our intended station, which led to a sort of circling around the stop we wanted. I hope one day it will seem funny.

On the plus side, the Brooklyn Museum has some amazing stuff. Continue reading →

Picking up where we left off yesterday, let’s talk a bit about the New York City subway system. See, you might think that you are pretty adept at navigating a city’s rail system, based on the fact that you had no problem with the metro systems of Washington, D.C. and multiple European cities^*, not to mention the bus systems of Washington, D.C. and Reykjavik. You might think that, but you still might not be prepared for the rainbow-hued, alphabet-soup, spaghetti-like clusterf*ck that is the New York City subway. See, from the map, it looked easy: hop on at the nearest station in Queens, about five blocks away, take the only line running out of that station (the purple one) to Grand Central, then take the green line going towards Brooklyn for 2 or 3 stops (I forget at the moment), and presto! You’re two blocks from your new hotel!

I didn’t account for two words, because I had no idea they were an issue: “local” versus “express.” We did eventually get to the hotel, and were able to reflect on how this was, on the scale of vacation f***ups, pretty close to the bottom.

From here, we began the walking. Oh, how we walked. I kept expecting my exercise tracker to ask who I was and why I stole an exercise tracker from a guy who takes an average of 3,000 steps a day. Continue reading →

I’m a life-long Texan who has never lived in a city with fewer than 1 million or more than 4 million people. My wife is a Midwestern girl from a small college town. We are off on an epic adventure to New York City, where the same number of people that live in Austin probably live in one city block.

So far, all we’ve managed to do is take a cab from La Guardia to a nearby hotel, eat some extremely Hunan-style food, and sleep. This morning, I wandered around until I found a place that sells decent-looking breakfast (it didn’t take long), noticed that the lounge on the top floor of the our hotel remains accessible even when no one is on duty there, and gotten kicked out of the lounge on the top floor of our hotel.

Today, we venture into “the City”—for my fellow country mice, that means Manhattan—for more adventures. All of this will culminate in (I shit you not) the ICCA Finals, as seen in the movie Pitch Perfect. That’s on Saturday.

Here are a few photographic highlights from my Flickr album-in-progress: Continue reading →