Second day in Miami

Second day began pretty much like the first, except today instead of walking to get coffee, I'd found out how to get free coffee in the lobby, so I drank that and then instead of walking or trying to rent a bicycle, I went for a swim. Normally, if there are bicycles available I'm on one, and if there aren't I'm out on a walk. But here, I have the unusual option of going for a swim in the open water. And this isn't cold lake water with a gooey bottom- this is the beach and salty water.

I'm not sure why there are no waves here; we seem to be facing straight east out into the Atlantic, but I'm not complaining. I love to body surf, but I rarely have the opportunity to go out into calm salt water and swim for a distance without fighting surf. This morning I did exactly that- I went out to the beach and swam about 1/3 mile in the ocean. It was fun. Very salty, but fun. I saw lots of fish, and got to experience swimming with and against a current (and I'll tell you, those math word problems are right, it is slower swimming against the current). So at this point it's to hell with the bike. I can ride at home anytime.

After my swim, we went and had breakfast. Unlike most hotels, this one is too fancy schmancy for a coffee shop, so you can get (and pay for) a cup of coffee in a bar or go to the main restaurant. I should note that, next to making you pay for internet access, not providing morning coffee is the second most annoying thing a hotel can do. But if you promise the host at the restaurant that you will come back later for breakfast, they will give you a cup of coffee to take out.

Breakfast in the main restaurant can be had indoors or out. They are vastly different experiences. Indoor is sedate and like eating anywhere else. Outside is like a nature show. You have at least 4 different kinds of birds and a couple of large lizards competing for leftovers. Of course, being birds and lizards, they spend almost as time time trying to drive each other off as they do eating. and then back to the beach. Our favorite thing was watching the birds at the sweetener basket. They never touched the Equal, or whatever is in the blue packets, but would pick up any pink Sweet 'n Low packets sitting on the counter, drop them in the basket, pick up a sugar packet, and fly away.

It was nicer out today than yesterday, and I stayed out in the sun a bit too long as a result. No biggie. At this point, I have an intense biker tan, which is like a farmer tan without the manure and with very tanned knees. So parts of my body are extremely tan and pretty resistant to the sun. The other parts aren't pasty, but they're definitely and obviously much lighter. If I can keep from burning my feet, though, I think I'm ahead of the game.

This hotel is full of employees around, saying hi, how are you today. I'm never sure how to respond to this stuff. Do I just say 'hi' and skulk away, or do I strike up a conversation by responding in kind. That would have to potential to make it take forever to get anywhere. It's complicated by the fact that while most of the people who work here can speak English, few of them understand it. They can ask you all kinds of basic questions, but if you answer in any kind of unexpected way, they're completely lost. That's not good news for me. I really don't know any Spanish at all.

After lunch, which we ate outside in spite of an occasional puff of cigar smoke from a nearby group, we hung in the room for a while until it was time to go into Coconut Grove for dinner. Coconut Grove is a little enclave about 20 minutes south of Miami proper, and so is about the same distance from us as Miami Beach. It's a cute mix of funky and mainstream, with a 3 story mall of sorts right smack in the middle. There's a movie theater there, so we went and watched a nice little movie called Enough Said by a writer director, Nicole Holofcener, we had met at a beach resort 20 years ago and who has put out several excellent movies over the years.

After an enjoyable movie, we ate at a place called Green Street Cafe, which is not on Green Street, but who's keeping track of that kind of thing anyway? Food was good,  though they had too many fans and it was very windy. But all in all it was an excellent day.

First day (plus) in Miami

After our marathon voyage here, it was nice to take it easy. We ate at a funky little place in a strip mall, right near the Winn-Dixie (I keep wanting to say Piggly Wiggly, but I don't think they have those here). Then back to the room and to bed early.

The next morning was bright and hot and I went for a short walk to get a cup of coffee. Key Biscayne is very close to Miami, but it's kind of out in the ocean and isolated too. There's about a half mile-long set of strip malls on one side of the street, mixed in with a couple of parks. The other side of the street is mostly apartment buildings with a couple of hotels mixed in. That's it. The rest of the island is a state park with beaches and tennis and whatever kinds of park stuff.

My walk keeps me in the shade for the most part. The hotel driveway is very long- it's about twice as far to the road as it is to the nearest strip mall once I'm out there. I look for someplace open and find a small bakery, where I get coffee. I sit in the shade and drink the coffee. The hotel has coffeemakers in the room but they're noisy and Ronnie was still asleep, and they don't make very good coffee, truth be told.

After returning to the hotel (this is the kind of nice place where they have a table full of water bottles and towels and sunscreen outside for the joggers) I went up to the room and the we had breakfast.

What else could we do at that point but go to the beach? It was hot and sunny and really quite pleasant for a while, in a way that would be awful at home but which is much more bearable when there's a large body of water in front of you. We had an umbrella and a flag to raise if we wanted drinks and I had a Grey Goose Frozen Lemonade, one of those things I would never do if I wasn't on vacation. It was good, though the problem with frozen drinks is that you can't nurse them, at least not when its 90 degrees out. I'm guessing that the drink is served frozen for a reason and did not want to tempt fate by letting it thaw.

Eventually, despite occasional dips in whatever body of water we're facing (they all kind of look alike, don't they?), we got hot, so we went back inside. After that, we had lunch and tried to get some coffee at Starbucks, but were foiled by a power surge that had knocked out the espresso machines. So we went back to the hotel and I swam a bit and did a short workout. When we figured the thunderstorms and the horrendous rush hour traffic had cleared, we headed into South Beach for dinner.

We didn't really want to do the whole South Beach scene, but Ronnie had been to a restaurant on Lincoln Road (which is a pedestrian mall for a few blocks) that she thought I'd like, so we went there. I like Lincoln Rd. It's a promenade in the best sense of the word. People just walking around, happy to be there- families, people with dogs, young couples, all strolling, eating, whatever. One of the things I really like about Miami is that it's almost like being in a foreign country. English is clearly not the first language for a significant portion of the populace, and it's occasionally hard to make yourself understood. But as both a cause and effect of this, it's an international destination for Spanish-speakers. Most seem to be from South America. It gives a real multicultural flavor and I'm sure that's why it's such a cultural hotbed.

Dinner was very tasty and afterward we promenaded back and forth, the maitre d's on the street trying to tempt you into their restaurants with "How are you this evening?" to which I'd reply, "Full." It was all in all a very nice vacation day.

SImple, but not easy

This has been one of the most convoluted travel days I've ever had, especially considering that all we were doing was flying nonstop from Philadelphia to Miami. It started as we approached the airport. The northbound direction of I-95 comes right up alongside the airport, yet for some reason the exit swings out and all the way across the expressway and back southbound to join the exit from southbound to the airport. Probably 2 miles of driving. Then we checked the bag and went to park. Somehow, this took us out of the airport and back all the way around again, finally leaving us at the parking area for our terminal.

There we were met by one of the Parking Authority employees who used to work in the cashier lanes before they realized that people with credit cards (i.e., everyone who flies) don't need a cashier to pay for parking. So they loiter by the entrances to the lots, helping people push the button to get a ticket. This time, he tells us that lots A, B, C, and D are all full and we'd have to park in the E/F. Lot. This is not ideal for a flight from terminal A.

But we manage to park the car and head into the terminal, only to get herded into the massive Terminal E security line. Once through there, we needed only to walk the entire length of the airport to get to the gate. It's only about a half a mile, but that's a long way to walk indoors. All told, it took almost an hour from our original arrival at the airport.

Made the plane though and the flight was fine. And then we go to Miami airport.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise; Miami airport, at least in its current incarnation, is an absolute disaster from a traveler's perspective. The walk from the gate to baggage claim took at least 15 minutes- so long that I was sure we'd gone around in a big circle. But no, it was just a big, curvy terminal. Terminal D in Miami has 60 gates. That's as many as Philadelphia Airport terminal B, C, D and E combined, to give you a sense of the scale, and there's lots of room for shops padded in there.

Baggage claim itself was routine, but then the real journey began, as we sought out the rental car. I had made sure to rent from an "in-terminal" company so I wouldn't have to endure a 10 minute shuttle bus ride like I did last time we were here. So we search for and eventually find the signs pointing to rental cars. These signs look nothing like the other airport signs. They're not overhead and official-looking, they're purple with yellow type and look like something advertising Chili's.

I don't even remember what we did next. Took an escalator up, I think, which brought us to sign point to the left for MIA Mover to rental cars. This leads us to a moving sidewalk, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another, then a left turn and over a bridge, then another moving sidewalk and another. Since we've been on moving things the whole time, we assumed we were doing the MIA Mover. But no. This 15 minute walk took us to a train. We then waited and took a train to the rental car building, which is huge and cavernous and contains about a dozen car rental companies.

But where were the cars? Finally we saw a sign pointing to Rental Car Pickup. Actually, there were 2 signs, pointing in opposite directions. Whew, that was just one pointing to an elevator and one toward an escalator. We get to the car, finally, over an hour since our plane landed. And keep in mind that nothing has gone wrong in any way. We followed the plan the designers had in mind.

But is this really the right way to set things up? Is that what they had in mind when they designed this almost shockingly dumb and downright unfriendly way of arranging things? Isn't someone in charge of making sure the initial experience in Miami is a positive one? If that was your job, sir or madam, you have failed.

It also seemed like an ordeal getting to the hotel, though that again was a reasonably short ride. Pouring rain and traffic and lots of route changes will give you that feeling, I guess. Finally we got here, and of course our room is all the way at the end of the hallway. Actually the end of a corridor off the end of the hallway. The room is very nice. From landing to in the room, including a 20 minute drive, two hours and five minutes. Maybe we'll keep it simple tomorrow.

School Days

We've been back at school working since September 2, and as of this afternoon, we have completed our first seven day cycle of classes. We have a half day tomorrow, and then off for a few more days, and then school really gets going. Except that I have to take Friday off to go to my own kid's school event. Whatever.

I'm completely grateful for even this little bit of school, considering what happened last year. At this time last year I was in 24/7 agony with shingles, which hung on until early in 2013. In ways, the year before was even more difficulty, when I was dealing with some very difficult and traumatic family issues that made each day a struggle. So when they ask me what are my goals for this school year, it's a singular. It's normalcy.

Of course, normalcy can be hard to come by in a place like this, because it is incorrigibly chaotic. Today, for example, the school was giving out iPads to the students. In order to receive their iPads, students had to sign a form accepting responsibility, etc, etc., which we handed out to alphabetically grouped mobs of students. There were so many people simultaneously asking for the forms that I literally forgot the names of students that I'd known for several years. Very embarrassing.

Then, in spite of having been told yesterday that the iPad Deployment, or iPD as we called it, would take the entire period, so I gave homework due the following day. It was announced after most of the students had their devices, that they should go to class. As in my class. Which I had not planned.

By the time I got to the classroom most of the students were charging their iPads and/or updating their operating systems. We started working, and after about 15 minutes, that nobody should be updating operating systems at that time because it would overwhelm the network. Well duh. Maybe should have thought about that, I dunno, yesterday? We had an ensuing conversation in class about how despite the veneer of organization, that there really wasn't any. I responded that this was one of the things I liked so much about working at this place. The kids all found that funny, but it's true. I don't like structure and I don't mind chaos. It plays to my strengths.

It struck me as I left school today how happy I was being there. I've always enjoyed my job, but this year it's really been nothing but fun. And hard work, of course, but it leaves me feeling good at the end of the day. Except then on the way home I yelled at a 12 year-old boy I didn't know. He came flying out of a side street though a stop sign without even looking and I just barely was able to swerve out of the way. I pulled the car over to block him, got out and did my best to scare him. Don't really think I succeeded, but I did my best.

Tomorrow I'm off for a long weekend in Miami. Check back for updates.

Not random notes because they're all by me

I was talking with some relatives the other day (just mentioning it because that's kind of unusual for me) and our generation's need for reading glasses came up. We were noting how much we preferred dealing with things that we could read without the glasses. I had been in a hotel the previous night and was taking a shower, during which I reached for the toiletries (I guess that's what they're called- my first thought was condiments, but I don't think that's right) and realized I couldn't read the labels. There were 4 bottles, once of which was bound to be shampoo, but which one? Putting conditioner or body wash or even mouthwash on by mistake wouldn't have been disastrous, but skin moisturizer would have been annoying to have to wash out and would smell for hours. I went for the orangey one, which turned out to be correct, but can us boomers have some larger type, please?

As usual, I've been riding my bike around a lot. One of the things I like is that I go on roads where I'd never be otherwise, either to make up new routes or to avoid traffic, bad pavement, and other dangers and annoyances. So today I took Ardmore Avenue across Haverford Rd. and immediately saw a road called Golfview Drive to the left. I turned in immediately, because aside from liking he punny name, I thought it would be pleasant to view some golf. I know there's a course there. I think they may have had some kind of golf contest or whatever they call it earlier this year. Anyway, I'm not a golf fan, but thought it would be a pleasant thing to view.

What a disappointment! I can tell you that there is no place riding along Golfview Drive were you can view golf. What you can view is a bunch of house that can view golf from their backyards, but even that was only one side of the street. I felt gypped, but there's nothing I can do except warn future generations about making the same mistake. I must note that it was a very pleasant road to ride on and view things other than golf.

On the same ride, I was riding along next to a stream when I started to see detour signs for Manoa Rd. I was planning to travel on Manoa Rd., so I noticed. I made my usual turns and realized I was on a very unusual detour, because the detour is Manoa Rd. I've never seen a road be its own detour before. I wonder how they came on that. I took my usual route and the detour both and went on my merry way.

Random good deeds

I just had this weird thing happen. I buy prepared food at this place called The Coopermarket near my house. Next door is this little boutique that I've never seen anyone go in and out of except for the owner. They'd been closed to a while for renovations, but apparently reopened recently.

I was walking out of Coopermarket and past the boutique and I hear a pounding on the window. I look over and some woman is motioning me inside. I go to the door and she asks me if I could help her. She tells me I look like someone who is good with mechanical things. This isn't really true. I'm mediocre with mechanical things, though I can usually manage in a pinch.

In any event, she shows me this little TV set with a built-in VHS player, with a little beige box attached to a rabbit-ear antenna with a wire on one side and the TV on the other. She says she can't get the TV to get any kind of picture. She keeps pushing buttons on the little beige box, which is branded something like Zimcor. That thing is supposed to give her a picture but it didn't appear to be doing anything. So I played around with it a little and she starts telling me about how it used to work. "You'd just push the buttons and it would change channels. The TV stayed on 3 or 4, but now I can't get it to go to 4, and all I can get is channel 29, which is in Spanish (emphasis hers)"

This was not useful information, so I stopped her for a second and said "I worked in cable TV for 20 years and I've never seen anything like this Zimcor thing." She says, "You don't know what it is?" And I reply, "Ma'am, you don't even know what this is and it's your thing. Nobody knows what one of these is."

But I decided to look at the back, because that's what us repair types do (and I really did used to do this kind of thing as a job), and I noticed a DC input. So I tell her it looks like it ought to be plugged in. This seems vaguely familiar so she hands me a basket full of obsolete electronics and cords. I root around until I find a promising-looking cord, plug it into the back of the Zimcor, and incredibly, the TV picture pops on. I tried not to look too surprised and she looked absolutely thrilled. I think she was happy with getting the TV to work, but I think what gave her the most pleasure was her wisdom in choosing me of all people to come in and help.

Nothing but crickets

It's the time of year when crickets begin to invade my house. I don't think enough about the intellectual capacity crickets to think that they're really planning on going inside someone's house, I just think they're looking for someplace warm andthey  feel warmth coming from the house and hang out nearby. Then they just hop right in when we open the door.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the only thing I knew about crickets were from Pinocchio. I think there are crickets even in Brooklyn, and I know that was chirping stuff outside during the summer, but I never really thought about what they were or the possibility of them coming into the house. And in Disney's Pinocchio, the cricket was dapper charming helpful little fellow.

Then one day, for some reason, I read the original Pinocchio. It was written by some Italian guy, I don't think it was da Vinci or Verdi, but it was some famous Italian guy I think. In the book, Jimmy Cricket is a scold. He's always trying to tell Pinocchio what to do and Pinocchio eventually gets frustrated with him and eventually squashes him with a shoe. Now that I have crickets in meeting my house, this seems like a much better outcome than what happens in the movie. Not that I know what happens to the cricket in the movie anyway. I can't even remember what happens to Pinocchio once he turns into a real boy. It can't be anything really good. He's basically an orphan, with some little old puppetmaker guy who'll probably be dead in 18 months as his stepdad. He has no skills or education or actual family. I guess that's okay as an outcome for a puppet, but it wouldn't be my first choice. It would be ironic if he ended up being a puppetmaker though, don't you think? "Oh yeah, I used to be just like you."

What the hell happened here?

I couldn't decide whether to come to the Phillies game tonight. They're playing San Diego, a team that probably has fewer players I've heard of than any team in baseball. Their cleanup hitter is named Jesus Guzman. No, I don't know who he is either, but he has 60 hits so far this year, which is only 60 more than me. And the Phillies are playing a team primarily made up of minor leaguers getting a tryouts, purportedly against major league competition. I have my doubts about that tonight. The guy currently batting is playing his first ever major league game.

Also arguing against attendance is the fact that it's 90 degrees out and muggy, and I'm tired from my first two days of work. But there are two things pulling me here. 

The first is why the hell would anyone come to this game? Really. Why? So that's intriguing. But I'd have to say that the biggest motivator for me to come is summer assignments. Not my summer assignments, mind you. I did everything I was supposed to this summer. No, it's students' summer assignments. I'm supposed to grade them, apparently. Summer assignments are packets of practice math problems we give the kids to remind them of what they were supposed to have learned the previous year.

In the abstract, I like summer assignments. The only problem with them is that now that the students finished them, I'm supposed to grade them. To be clear, I have no objection to grading papers. It's pretty easy to grade math papers, compared to English or History essays. The problem is that they're (relatively) long and they come in right at the beginning of the year, before I've gotten into any kind of school rhythm. To put it more succinctly, it messes with my mojo. So I come to the game as a particularly effective way of procrastinating grading.

In the past, to be perfectly honest, I've not taken the grading of summer assignments to be a sacred duty, and I'll even admit to not grading some of them. Okay, most of them. The kids don't mind, because as long as they did the papers, their ungradedness is not their fault and so I give them full credit. This year, however, I'm really grading them. 

I'm not sure why this is. I can blame my new office mate, a teacher in her first year at the school and understandably anxious to impress. She started grading hers as soon as she'd finished her first class. I'll have more to say about her later, but I can't really blame her. I don't need to look good compared to her, which is a good thing. But her industriousness inspires me to some extent, plus I've come off two horrendous school years and am trying to make a sort of fresh start. I've tried to organize my stuff, with a small, but noticeable degree of success, and I'm trying to be more together.

But really, when it comes right down to it, I owe it to the students. The ones who worked hard deserve the credit more than the ones who blew it off, and I want to give them that. I'm always inclined to mistrust any signs of industriousness on my part. I am unabashedly lazy, but who knows maybe, as I approach my 58th birthday, I'm finally growing out of it. Man, I hope not.

On the hopeful side, note that I am blogging about grading summer assignments rather than actually grading them.

New school year (updated 1:40)

There are not a lot of things that make me nervous at my advanced age, but the first day of school is one of them. Whether I'm meeting all of my students for the first time or reconnecting with most of them, everything is new and different and unexpected. I know, it seems weird that teaching AP Calculus for the third time can feel completely different, but it is.

Honestly, this nervousness is the reason that even after doing this for 10 years(!) now, I don't find anything about it boring. The interaction between students and material is never the same from one day to the next. We all keep growing, but the kids especially change radically not only from year to year, but from month to month.

This year is especially nerve-wracking because we merged with another school, bringing in a much larger student body and faculty. This means a certain level of chaos, and I love chaos in a supposedly structured environment. We will see how it goes. I've augmented the chaos by preparing only minimally.

I'll update this as the day goes on, so check back. We're only up to the opening assembly.

I'm 3 classes in right now. Most of the day has been filled with my favorite pair of questions- where am I and what am I doing? I don't know the kids, I don't know where my rooms are, and I don't always know where to start. But I'm muddling through. More later.

Moving in, day 2

Sunday got off to an interesting start, because when I went out for my morning walk, I encountered the moving-in line for my daughter's dormitory. It was long, but it seemed fairly routine, until the real action got going. My younger daughter is going to a music school, and so the first question you ask someone after their name is what's your instrument. So Jeanne, from Macungie, Pennsylvania and her son whose name escapes me, who plays the drums, was sitting in a folding chair, waiting for her husband Dan return from parking the car. Her son appeared and asked her to come up with to the room with him. She asked if I minded watching the stuff until then return.

I said sure and sat down in the chair. About 30 seconds later the sky opened up and rain began pouring down in buckets. Thunder, lightning all at stuff. Someone from the college came running around with tarps, which I put over the kid's stuff. A few minutes later, a very perplexed Dan came back to find nobody he knew and some strange man sitting in his folding chair. We had a friendly conversation while we kept ourselves dry and tried to keep the kid's things covered with the tarp. The rain was pouring down and people were scrambling around, but everything seemed to be going okay until someone pulled the fire alarm. Ha ha ha. Everybody then comes pouring out of the dorm into the pouring rain. Lots of pouring everywhere. Then the firetrucks showed up.

At this point, I had no particular purpose to be there but I didn't want to leave the covered area where I was standing. Eventually it was all clear and people went back into the dorm and continued loading up and soon the rain stopped. I took a lap through the Public Garden and went back to my room with stories to tell.

Our own move was more routine, although there was some rain in the middle of it. The order of affairs was for our daughter to go get her room key, then get in line to move her stuff up to the room. She went off to find the KeyMaster, while Ronnie and I got in line for the freight elevator. We were staying in a hotel that was less than two blocks from the school, so it seemed ridiculous to bring the car around, but the key to that working was to get a hotel luggage cart. Considering that the hotel was very full between school move-in, the Red Sox, and the impending Boston Tatoo Convention, it took some serious skulking around the lobby to find a recently abandoned cart but eventually I did.

After a trip to the parking lot to load up and a rather harrowing trip down a ramp among cars into a traffic jam, I trundled the thing over to the school, luggage dripping off both sides until I got some unexpected help from a very energetic guy. I asked him why he appeared so fresh and full of pep, and he told me that he had hired two people to help them move his kids stuff into the dorm, and it was the best hundred dollars ever spent. So he was more than happy to help move my cart little bit.

I got in there just as my wife had become first in line for the elevator, so in and up we went with all our stuff. The dorm room itself was almost shockingly nice, with carpet and a separate bathroom. There were bunk beds, but just the top bunks, with dresser and desk underneath. This seems a very efficient arrangement, as long as you don't mind working a bed over your head. There's enough room to set up some musical equipment, but the college does not allow practicing/playing in dorm rooms. That's a good idea, I think, considering that everyone in the dorm plays something. It would be fun to have an Everyone-In-The-Dorm-Practice-At-The-Same-Time Day, but I'm not holding my breath. There are practice rooms on every floor.

For a little while, I participated in the unpacking, but eventually first returned the luggage cart to the hotel and then camped out in the hallway with roommate-dad, where we discovered that we have had pretty much the same career path. Very coincidental and strange.

Eventually, we said goodbye and let her get oriented. We decided to stay on for an extra day, which turned out to be a mixed-at-best decision. This required changing hotels. If you want to see the review of the second hotel, see here.  By the time we finished all of this, we were pretty exhausted, so we ordered takeout from Legal Seafood and called it a night.

One move too many, part 1

Over the summer, we realized that our two kids need to be dropped at college. On consecutive days. The original plan was to rent two vans, drive them to New York, drop one kid and one van in New York, and then move onto Boston. This seems like a good plan, until we found out one kid really wanted to be in Boston at 6 PM. This would have required leaving Philadelphia really really early. We absolutely did not want to do this, so my wife and one van and kid went straight to Boston while New York.

Getting the vans was fun. You can't drive to the rental car place to get a van, so on Friday night my daughter dropped me to get van #1 and on Saturday morning I took public transit to the airport to get van #2, starting with riding my bike to the train station at 7AM.

Amazingly, the New York drop off went pretty smoothly. I pulled right up to the school on Broadway,  where I was told by a very serious security guard that I could only park there for around 20 minutes. In past years, I would have made a fuss about how nobody was there and why would I have to move, but since my incident over the summer, my spider sense told me that this would be a waste of time. The good news was that they gave us a parking permit and asked me to fill in the time of arrival. I was strategic about my choice.

The only difficult part of this process was the sheer tininess of her room, which required moving pieces around like in one of those 15 numbers in 16 boxes puzzles. But we finally fit everything in with surprising ease. Maybe that's because we forgot to bring stuff (like her office chair), but that's a quibble.

Then it was time to drop off the car. First, I had to put gas in the minivan or endure the $9.29 per gallon refill charge. This required a visit to the Shell station on 96th St. It's a normal-looking gas station, but who do you think is buying gas at 96th and First? Yep, it's cab drivers. Lots of them. I had to circle the pumps trying to decide whether there was a protocol or every car for itself. Quick analysis showed that the protocol was in fact every car for itself. I wormed my way up to the pump, filled up and was on my way, having only been honked by 5 different cabs in the process.

I've rented cars in central cities a bunch of times, but the Budget rental place was one of the best. Three narrow driveways side-by-side face the street, the 3rd, the one with the steep ramp up, was the drop off. The ramp leads to a dimly lit space, where I stood by myself until some guy told me it was okay to go downstairs to the office, which was between driveways 1 and 2.

After successfully completing the drop off, I grabbed a cab and went to Penn Station, just in time to grab lunch (it was 3:45 at this point) and scramble onto a train to Boston. Its a pleasant enough ride, if a bit long. Or at least it seems long except compared to the Boston van, which took 7 hours to go 250 miles. I got in around 9:30 a mere 14 1/2 hours after I started. End of part 1.