Manhattan Melodies, Honeymoon Style Part I

As most of you know, my darlin' Mrs. K and I got all o-fficially hitched up a while back, and got back from honeymooning on New York City a couple of weeks ago. Yes, that New York City (as opposed to the one in Iowa?). It's funny, when we told people that's where we were going, we got one of two responses, separated in text only by a punctuation mark: we either got "New York?", or "New York!" It seems that it surprised half of you, and excited the other half. Here's why we picked it: we've been together for 7 years. We've been on a cruise together, we've been to Europe together, and both of us pretty much consider spending more than a couple of hours (per decade) at a beach a pure, salty, gritty hell. I've played in New York a few times, but pretty much only went to and from the gig, and never really spent any time there. Mrs. K went there on a high school trip, and hasn't been there as grown-up-type person. We also both get pretty fired up for damn good food and cool bars, plus we were willing to be "touristy" enough to get to a couple of museums and a Broadway play. And last but certainly not least, we had always talked about going, but said we only really wanted to go when would have enough money to do whatever we wanted (which we thought would be never), and be able to take cabs and not take the subway everywhere, and just be our normal jolly selves and not be trying to pinch pennies in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Hence our shameless begging for donations to the "honeymoon fund" in lieu of wedding presents. Once again, our endless thanks to our friends and family for their love and generosity, they really made it so that we were able to have a great trip.

So, here's my best description of our trip, complete with rambling, random lists, and snarky comments.

The Amazing Flying Wallaces

Let's start with the traveling, eh? First off, AMERICAN AIRLINES SUCKS. I've never had anything but problems with them, I'll never fly that airline again, and I encourage all of you to do likewise. As soon as our pal Steph drops us off at the airport, we notice there's a big line at the "outside check-in" station, which is unusual. We said screw that, we'll just go inside and check in. WRONG! As soon as we walk in the door, we see a terminal packed to the gills with pissed off travelers, say about 200 strong. We ask some people in line (since there are no airline agents to be seen) what's going on, and they tell us American Airlines has cancelled a bunch of flights. So, I go check "the big board", and lo and behold, our flight is canceled. Not "delayed" or "changed" -- CANCELLED. Along with every other American flight that I can see. Dear God, you gotta be kidding me. Our bags suddenly gained about 20 pounds of weight as we stood there. We also realize about that time that the giant crowd of people isn't just a big mass of folks, it's a line. Not lines, it's one line. So, I stand in it. While I stay there, Kris goes off to check out where the line really starts and stops, if there is only one line, and to call her Mom to see if she can look online and see what the hell is going on. It turns out that the line ends at the door we just walked in, snaked around a couple of times, went back outside of a door about 20 yards away, came back inside, then snaked it's way about 10 times around again before getting to the check-in desks, where there was a grand total of maybe four agents working. It would probably take about five hours to get through that line, and some people who weren't very far in front of me had already been there an hour and a half. And not a single other American Airlines employee in sight to answer questions and direct people accordingly. It turns out that Kris's Mom (thanks Katie!!) looked online and saw that we had already been rebooked for a flight a couple of hours from then. So, Kris had the genius idea to take some advice from "that lady", and go stand in this other, shorter line that was buried amongst the throngs. Here was how the conversation went:

K: See that line right there? We need to get in that one.

R: Huh? Why?

K: Because that lady said so. She said her sister did it, and she got through with no problem.

R: "That lady"? What "lady"??

K: The one right there. In the t-shirt.

R: We're supposed to lose our place in the line we've been standing in for 45 minutes already, and go stand in that impossibly short one, because "that lady" said so??

K: Yep.

R: Really babe, it can't be that easy. If it was that simple, the line wouldn't be so short. What makes us different than the other 198 people waiting in line?

K: Don't know, don't care. Just go.

The other nice lady behind us said to go ahead, if it didn't work out we could get back in the line where we were. Now that's good folks right there! So, we went. We stood in line for about 10 minutes, got up to the front, got our boarding passes for the new later flight, and went in. No thanks to American Airlines, whose one and only helpful employee was a woman standing in front of the lines, frantically hollering and shoving people around to the place where they needed to be. She kicked ass. Otherwise, thanks, to the random "that lady"! And thanks Kris, for blindly following "that lady's" unreasonable yet correct leadership. We headed straight for the bar.

Return Of The Amazing Flying Wallaces

I know it's hard to believe, but -- drumroll, please -- the trip home sucked too! Maybe even worse than the trip up there. We get to LaGuardia Airport in plenty of time for our flight, no big deal. We get our boarding passes, check our luggage, and get through security, no problem. We find our gate, check the big board, and lo and behold, our flight is delayed 15 minutes. Not a super-big deal, but it's a little worrisome since we only have a 1-hour layover for our connecting flight from Dallas to Austin. But as long as there's no more delays, we'll be fine. We settled in for some fries & beers at the bar. Checking the board again -- now it's delayed 20 minutes. Now 30. Now 45. And now we're screwed. We're definitely going to miss our connecting flight, but even that's not a huge deal, we'll just have to hang out in Dallas for a couple more hours till the next flight. So, after the final delay of one hour in LaGuardia, we land in Dallas, and go to the desk at the terminal to get rebooked to the next Austin flight, as we were instructed on the plane. Unfortunately, there are also 5 or 6 other groups ahead of us, trying to do the same thing. The woman and zit-faced teenager behind the counter are ever so helpful:

Woman: (taptap tappity tap on her computer)

People In Line: Um, excuse me, miss. What are we supposed to do here?

Woman: (taptap tappity tap taptap)

People: Helloooo?? Ma'am?

Woman: (tappity taptap, not looking away from her screen) I'm sorry, all flights are cancelled. There won't be any more flights till tomorrow. (tappity tappity tap)

Me: I just saw three flights to Austin on the big board that don't say cancelled, delayed, or anything. What about those?

Woman: (tappitytappitytappity tap) There are no flights.

Zit-faced Teen: (sarcastically) What are the flight numbers?

Me: You want me to go write them down?

Teen: Sure.

Me: You gotta be ffff..... um, OK.

I walk over to the big board, write down the flights. I give them to the counter woman.

Woman: (tappity taptaptap t-t-t-tap)

Us: Well? Ma'am?

Woman: (Sigh...) I've got you down for standby on the 8:15 flight. If you can't make that, there's a 10 and a 10:15, but you can only pick one.

Us: What?? OK, whatever, fine, thanks.

Woman: (tappitytappity taptaptap.....)

And that was the abbreviated version.

We head to the terminal (which, of course, is on the other side of the airport), and while we're in the electric shuttle-car deal, we realize the problem -- there's a giant, black, nasty storm about to nail us. Like, big green churning tornado clouds and the whole bit. So, we get to the terminal where our flight is (remember, we're still only on standby), and there are about a million people standing in line. We hear people grumbling about, "I can't stay here 13 hours", and "They better get us a nice hotel". And, surprise surprise again, there are literally NO American Airlines employees ANYWHERE to be found. Apparently once everything started getting cancelled, they all just went to the break room or something to avoid us pesky customers. Feeling as though I just got kicked in the gut by a Brogan, I slumped down next to a water fountain, and start scouting out spots to sleep, possibly for the night. Kris goes in search of... well, anything. She finds nothing in particular (except for a random man behind a counter wearing a AA Captain's badge who said "Good luck finding any gate attendants right now."), but does hear a couple of people in line saying that they heard that there are no standby passengers getting on any flight, at any time. So we say forget that, we're 3 hours from Austin, we're driving home. No way are we going to trust these American Airlines morons to do the right thing, take care of us, and get us home any time in the next two days. We start following signs to "rental cars", which eventually lead us to.... an empty garage basement parking lot with no rental cars anywhere in sight. Finally we see a bus that says "To Rental Cars" on the front, and we hop on. When the driver finally gets moving, we drive literally about 5 miles and seem to be exiting the airport. "Where the hell is he taking us?" is the general consensus among the 5 or so weary, irritable passengers on board. Finally he drops us off at the rental car place, which is fairly deserted. I spot a dude trying to make it to the same Alamo line as me, and suddenly the theme from "Chariots Of Fire" pops into my head, I hit my lanky-stride real hard, and I squeak in just before he gets there. We ask Zit-Faced Teen #2 if we can get a car to Austin, to which he turns to the chick at the next counter and says, "Hey, do we have any cars left?" Good God. Well, it turns out that they did, and we end up the proud renters of a big orange PT Cruiser. We eventually make it out of the airport property, but only after we noticed that the blue airport signs had turned into green interstate signs, seeing as how there's not a single sign at that God-forsaken airport that says, "This Way To Get The Hell Out Of This God-Forsaken Airport". Kris says, "We can stop at a hotel for the night if you don't fell like driving all that way tonight." To which I reply, "No. Home. Now." We hunkered down and hightailed it. Fast.

The moral of the story? AMERICAN AIRLINES SUCKS. You mean you have your hub city in North Texas, one of the worst weather areas in the country (snow, ice, floods, dust storms, tornados), and you have no better contingency plan for bad weather than "everything's cancelled"?? Christ on a cracker, there's storms like this all spring long, every single year, and they last about 15 minutes each!! Just delay your flights and move on! But no, it's easier for them to just cancel everything and start over, and the inconvenience it causes their customers is irrelevant. It just proves that American Airlines puts a very low priority on customer service, as they've proven to me several times even before this trip.

God, I hate flying.

Life At 58th And 7th Ave.

This is the location of The Hudson Hotel, where we spent 5 days and nights of cool, weird, fun, bona fide marital bliss. This is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a couple of blocks west of Central Park, about 15 blocks north of Times Square. A partly residential, partly business, partly tourist-oriented part of Manhattan. Before we ever arrived, we read in several places where the hotel was described as "trendy", and that the rooms were cool but tiny, which is a propo for just about any place remotely affordable in Manhattan. All this turned out to be true.

You enter the hotel with the assistance of a gaggle of bustling, black-vested doormen into a small foyer. You then go up a funky-lit escalator into a wide, semi-dark lobby decorated with oak and plush furniture, all the while getting the increasing volume of house-funk DJ music from the Hudson Bar (which we will get into later), occupying a good portion of the lobby.

We were on the 6th floor, which was apparently the "Priceline floor", because the only people we saw getting off the elevator on our floor were "normal" people like us -- basically, people not looking like they just stepped out of the pages of Maxim, GQ, or Forbes Magazine. People on other floors looked like their shoes or cufflinks cost more than our rent. One night, though, as we came into the lobby, we heard a woman in a shrill twang cawing to her group of friends, "Oh, y'all, look! Idn't this just neat?" I elbowed Mrs. K and whispered, "Look, honey -- we're not the biggest hillbillies here anymore!" Actually, we did OK with not looking like tourists all the time; we actually brought some decent clothes with us, and of course Mrs. K went plenty crazy with the shoes. We apparently didn't act too much like jerkfaced tourists either, because the entire staff -- doormen, desk clerks, restaurant staff, concierge, random phone people, even the ID-checker at the elevators -- were extremely courteous and polite to us the entire time, which we didn't really expect, with it being a "trendy Manhattan hotel" and us being "tourists from Texas" and all. I guess it really boils down to acting like you know what the hell you're doing (even if you don't), not asking stupid questions (or realizing it when you do), and not getting all in a tizzy when every person you speak to doesn't bow and cater to your every whim. Just be smart, be polite, don't be a jackass, and you'll get the same in return.

Location-wise, it was perfect -- the intersection of 58th and 7th Ave. has a bodega (corner store for beer & such) on one corner, a hot dog stand on another corner, a 24-hour CVS Pharmacy on another, and a 24-hour takeout/delivery diner called The Flame right across 57th St. from the hotel. Suh-weet! Pretty much all our basic needs were met within a 1-block radius.

My favorite part of the block was right in front of the hotel -- possibly the best people-watching I've ever seen. First off was the taxi situation. The Hudson Hotel, with no sign, on a nondescript corner on the Upper West side, was the ONLY hotel we saw in the entire borough that had taxis lined up, 4 or 5 deep, at all times, all day and all night. The doormen obviously had some sort of "arrangement" worked out with the cab drivers, as we saw some very discreet extra-long-handshake cash exchanges going on now and again. Because the location housed both the hotel and the Hudson Bar, there was a constant parade of cabs, limos, and caddied Benzes, purging and consuming slinky-gowned socialites, scantily-clad semi-skanks, dudes in Italian suits and stylin' coiffs, other chaps going with the hip-casual blazer-and-jeans, shoes-with-no-socks look, like Jeff Foxworthy without the porn-stache and mullett. This was intermingled with the steady stream of hipster wannabes and skanks-in-training, willing to stand in line inside the lobby while a somehow simultaneously snarky and smiling attendant with a clipboard and a velvet rope determined their fates for the evening. And there I was, standing outside, an unobtrusive distance away, in my Levis, Chucks, and a t-shirt, Rangers cap and specs, alternately sipping a soda fountain Coke (often laced with a heroic dose of Bacardi) and munching a hot dog, just watching the festivities. "Heh-heh. Wow, lookit 'em. Heh-heh. (munch, munch....slurp...)." I could've stood there all damn day and night, and never got tired of that. It was beautiful.

(See more stuff in Part II....)

Roger