Choo Choo

Relatives from Germany visited us over the past three weeks. They flew home yesterday. On Monday, we took them to NYC. None of us have taken public transportation before. We hopped the light rail to Trenton, where we picked up the train to Penn Station. If you are in New York just for the day and want to see as much as possible, the double-decker tour buses are a good way to see it all. We did the downtown loop. You can go around as many times as you want and get on and off as often as you want. I plan on going back to see the different neighborhoods.

I took a few pictures but mostly I enjoyed seeing the great architecture, the Naked Cowboy, a street dance troop, people from all over the world, the lights at night and the possibilities.

The only problem was the bathrooms. There are very few public ones and most are disgustingly filthy.

You should know that the tour buses stop at seven and they are very crowded at the end of the day. We stood for an hour on the last bus. They don’t drop you off where you get on, either. We walked fifteen blocks at the end of the day back to Penn Station. We caught a commuter train out of the city. We had to stand here, too. When we caught the last light rail (I didn’t know there was a last one) we found out that not only was it the very last one of the night (lucky us) but it stopped four towns short of our destination (not lucky us.)

What were we going to do, you ask? My brother wanted to call my seventy-five year old father to come out at ten thirty at night to pick us up. No, said I, we’ll take a bus. Just as we got off the light rail a bus trundled up the deserted street. I jumped into its path and flagged it down. It happened to be twenty-five minutes late on its route. Getting on with us was a woman who showed every sign of being bipolar. Her foot was in a cast and she was on crutches. She entertained us with the story of how she was hit by a car and the driver got out and punched in the face as she lay on the ground. Fun stuff.