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.