Planes, Trains, and Tow Trucks: Logan Goes to New York City (Part 3: Monday)

We started Monday off right with bagels and lox!!

And then I got initiated into New York City-style driving by following Iris to Queens from Rockville Centre.  I believe that the phrases, "We're all gonna die" and "she's going to do that?  Oh SHIT, I have to do that!" were used frequently as I white-knuckled my way through the ride while somehow managing not to piss myself or injure anyone.  Actually, it's a miracle that I didn't teach Logan any choice phrases in the process, because there was a LOT of New York City-style cursing occurring during this drive and not all of it was under my breath.  It probably would've been amusing if someone (my mom or Randy) took pictures of this, but that is probably for the best as it could have gotten distracting.  They were probably just too busy fearing for their lives.

We arrived in one piece and parked across the street from Iris' aunt's building and hopped on the subway toward Central Park.  Logan and the rest of us loved the Central Park Zoo.  We saw sea lions, penguins, a polar bear, a snow leopard, red pandas getting fed and lots more.  

That awkward moment when the deer
realizes that the crane is bigger than it. 

Mom's face after the ibis pecked at her finger 

The children's zoo is actually separate from the Central Park Zoo, so we took a little walk through Central Park to get there.  The Children's Zoo is mostly a petting zoo of farm animals, which I thought Logan would love.  However, he strangely didn't want to pet or feed (or get remotely close to) the goats or sheep in the Children's Zoo, but was more than happy to pet the statues of the animals.   Heather and I, as good Kappas of course, posed with the sheep!  

Since we were basically doing the "what to do with kids in NYC" tour of Central Park (even though 5 of the 6 of us were adults), our next stop was the Central Park Carousel, which was surprisingly difficult to find for us and included us walking in the completely wrong direction following what we thought was calliope music, but instead turned out to be street performers in the park.  Ooops.

We did find the carousel though, which was a big hit with our groups' kid and adults, who also took a ride!


By then we were getting hungry again, so grabbing NYC hot dogs in the park happened (pizza - check, awesome Italian food - check, bagel with lox - check, hot dog stand - check. We were doing a great job of eating our way through NY).  While eating our hot dogs, we headed in the direction of one of my FAVORITE places in New York.  Strawberry Fields.  Even though I've been there before ...

Spring Break 2001...Why don't I have that hat anymore?

...it was absolutely necessary to pay homage to John Lennon again.  Besides, LOGAN hadn't been there before, nor had mom, Randy, or Heather.






Right after I snapped that picture of Logan, he got super cranky, and then just passed out.  I like to think that it was John Lennon's ghost that sang him off to dreamland, but it was likely just pure exhaustion.

And I'd love to say that we left Central Park, hopped on the subway, and then got to our cars to head to dinner.  But that wouldn't be a very good story, would it?  Nah...traveling has to have some sort of excitement, right?  Right.  So we headed back to where the cars were parked and well...they were not there.  And we weren't lost, it was definitely the right street and there definitely were NO cars parked there anymore.  And then we saw the sign.  No standing 4pm-7pm.  Well FUCK - 5 adults missed that sign in the morning when we parked.  It was 6pm.  Both our rental cars got towed.  And we had no clue where to.  And didn't really know the license plate numbers or anything (well until we noticed that one of the three numbers on the key fob HAD to be the plate number).  Iris was really the rockstar here since she's the one that tracked down the cars with very little help from the doorman at her Aunt's building and the ridiculously complicated NYPD phone system for tracking down where a towed car goes.  Anyway, after several phone calls and lots of waiting, we finally found out where the cars were...and (drumroll, please)  they were in Maspeth.  We had a location and an address!  Oh wait, that intonation in Iris' voice when she said, "Maspeth" didn't sound so good.  Yep, Maspeth was not conveniently located from where we were.  Oh, and now nearly everyone's phones were dead and the chargers were (another drumroll, please) IN THE CARS.  How none of us went batshit crazy at that point, I will never know.  Next I knew, I was about to learn how to hail a cab with Iris while Logan, my mom, Randy, & Heather found some food.  This was supposed to be easy because, "cabs drive by on this road all the time".  All the time, but not when we need them AT ALL.  And apparently hailing a cab in this part of Queens involves waving ones arms around like a crazy person and jumping into oncoming traffic to get them to stop.  We FINALLY got one, and because at this point the universe hates us, the taxi doesn't take credit cards and we BARELY have enough cash between the two of us to get us to the impound lot.  We get there and wow, is it in a sketchy part of town, under an overpass and everything!

Photo credit: Iris Goldfeder

We get in and they take our info and they tell us that we have to get the rental car agreements.  Well shit...those are in the cars (of course - that's where they're SUPPOSED to be).  So we get sent out to the nice security officer to get driven to our vehicles and get our paperwork out and then driven back. Where we waited some more (and amused ourselves taking a few pictures) until we got called up.  We were being nice and friendly with the cashier lady and she managed to get distracted and got our paperwork all kinds of screwed up with each others AND with someone else's, and then she couldn't find our licenses for a while in the mess, and then we find out that it was this woman's first week on the job.

See all those stamps?  That's because she was using the
wrong fucking stamp on top of everything else!

And at this point, I think we were probably both twitching from the uncontrollable urge to laugh (because what else COULD we do at this point), and from the want to make a lot of noise about the level of incompetence.  But being in there, we sort of saw that things could be a whole lot worse, because some people were definitely not getting there cars back that day, and whether that was their own dumb faults or not, that definitely sucks.

Photo credit: Iris Goldfeder

Eventually ($185 poorer from paying the impound redemption fee) we got our cars back only to find the $115 parking tickets affixed to the windshields.  Most.expensive.parking.spot.EVER.

But not all was lost, because I definitely got some good bonding time with Iris!  And I got to do some more NYC-style driving to follow Iris back to her Aunt's to the rest of our group, where Logan was keeping himself busy causing noise complaints from the downstairs neighbors by repeatedly dropping his toys and running around on the hard wood floors.

And THAT, Ladies & Gentlemen is how we added a taxi, a police car, and a tow truck to our tour of NYC transportation (well WE didn't get to ride in a tow truck, but our cars did, so...).



 More pictures here.