My Empire State Of Mind

Seeing as it's a Friday night and I'm bored with nothing to do, I figured I would tell a story or 2 from my New York trip. The relevence to sports, you ask, one of my mentees thinks there is a chance she is related to Chad Henne.

It started with a horrible night sleep last night. Everything possible woke me up and got no more than 2 hours of straight sleep. Ultimately, I was up at 5:45 for the bus to leave at 6:30 dark and early in the morning.

On the bus, I was really zoned out and day dreaming. Not sleeping, not watching the movie just zoned out. So zoned out that I did not hear, see, or smell the mentee 3 rows behind me throwing up in the aisle way. The funnier part: the guy across from me, who albeit had headphones on and was listening to music, also did not hear, see, or smell this when it happened. Very odd.

After 3 hours in a bus, we eventually get to the concrete jungles of New York City. Our first stop: the United Nations. We are there early and have some time to chill so we chill. Then the tour starts. And as the tour goes on, the mentee who was sick on the bus gets even sicker. So much so that she ended up in a chair passing out.

They took her to the UN emergency room (they have a UN emergency room; who knew) and the rest of us were just forced to wait. Now we had this day all planned out with everything scheduled at specific times. Not only was the health of one of our mentees in jeopardy, but now our schedule, including a non-changable reservable dinner at 4:00 PM was also in deep doo-doo. After an extended period of waiting, we eventually end up deciding to leave the sick mentee with the professor (he shall be referred to as Luke from here on out in this story) in charge of the trip so that we can continue. One of the co-mentors tracked down Luke in the emergency room, got the tickets, and off we went to Ellis Island.

We get there, pick up our pre-paid tickets and are about to get in line for the ferry when all of a sudden we see Luke.

"Luke!!! How did you get here??"

In retrospect, that's about as dumb a question as asking a woman how old she is or how much she weighs. It's New York, how else would he get from point A to point B so quick. But I was thinking if we were lucky, we would catch up with Luke and the sick mentee at dinner. Instead, we run into them both at Ellis Island. Apparently they left 20 minutes after we did, but we have a really slow bus or something so they were able to catch up. And yes, she was feeling better. I don't know what they gave to her, but it worked.

Regardless, this did throw us off. Our ferry was scheduled to leave Ellis Island at 1:00 but we missed that one by a half hour. Instead we waited for seemingly forever for the next ferry. This took so long that right away, we realized that our dinner reservation at 4:00 was fucked up. I'm not even sure if we could have not gotten off the ferry period at Ellis Island and just took a round boat trip and still gotten back on the bus and back to the city in time for NYC. The program coordinator of the group (he who shall be known as Jesus from here on out; English pronounciation) called them several times and they could not move our reservation later to 4:30. Eventually it had just gotten to the point where we decided to cancel. Keep in mind, all this is on the ferry to Ellis Island. We were at the Liberty Island stop forever as 3,000 people got on and off the ferry, respectively.

Jesus calls the place we were supposed to be eating and decide to cancel, thus ensuring that we will be billed a $100 cancellation fee. And then, out of nowhere, Jesus announces that they can fit us in at 5:00! Amazing.

So we get to Ellis Island and go see if we can locate our ancestors. Sadly, I did not know enough to weed out everyone else with the same name as my relatives so I was unsuccessful. We meet back at 4:00 to catch a 4:20 ferry. We wait.....we wait......and we wait. No ferry. The ferry eventually comes at 4:25, but that's just it. We were told it would leave 5 minutes before that. Problem with the restaurant! We know there is no way we can get to that restaurant in time.

We get on the ferry, call them, tell them we are going to be late, they give poor Jesus hell (not that I blame them, mind you). We get there at around 5:30 and procede to enjoy more food than most of us have ever seen in our entire lives. And we were all starving as well seeing as our food had thus far consisted of donuts and a couple snacks.

Afterwards, we got back on the bus and headed know. Yep, that's my day in New York City. I hope I did not bore you too much, but I figured that those that like stories of strange days would enjoy it.

I'll have some pictures eventually if you care to see them.