Tattooed Travel

Do you ever look around

I’ve been told I can only make that joke twice.

New York, the complete opposite of Michigan. Very little greenery, everybody on a constant move, a hustle and bustle of big city life and apartments that cost 5k/month.

We loved it.

Our flight out was a little iffy with the Debby storm rolling through, our flight got delayed by an hour, then once we boarded we got grounded for another 2 hours. Have you ever been stuck on a plane on the runway, hoping your flight wasn’t going to get canceled for 2 hours? I do not recommend.

After a bumpy landing, and a very nice Uber driver who gave us lots of restaurant suggestions for Moroccan food, we finally made it to our hotel. Our first order of business was to find our first restaurant. We chose a great ramen place, Kame. Spicy broth just hits different after a day of stressful traveling.

The amount of different restaurant styles in New York is absurd. Everything. Literally everything. Part of our goal in traveling is to eat, and we would have to stay in New York for a month to make it through a 5 block radius. We’d also be broke by the end of the month.

Watching the New York traffic reminded me of being in SE Asia, but with traffic laws. Honks are not an angry “get out of my way or I’ll burn your house down” but more of a “hey just lettin’ you know I’m right here” and there’s the general consensus that foot traffic has higher priority over vehicle traffic. Speaking of, the amount of foot traffic in New York is wild. The public transport system set up is not only actually useful, but is heavily used. New York is a very good example of what public transportation can do. Sure, you see some weird stuff and some weird people, but honestly it’s not that different than the average street in downtown Denver. I was pleasantly surprised at how nice/polite everybody was. Maybe we got lucky, but nobody was shoving each other out of the way, nobody was getting pissy about congested doors, nobody was yelling at people to get out of the way. The image of New York some people try to scare people with isn’t really a (normal) thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to go down to the subway at 2am and expect to have a great time, but as a day-to-day travel system, New York exceeded my expectations by a good margin.

We did all kinds of touristy things, saw the 9/11 memorial, went up to the top of the One World Trade Center to get in some of the beautiful views, watched a dance group on the sidewalk jump over a line of people, successfully navigated the subway system (shout out to CityMapper), jay-walked.

It definitely pushed my leg a little harder than expected, but it also helped show us some of our limits and gave us a better idea of what we’ll need to do for rest days. Rest days are easy to skip over when you’re imagining your dream trip, but they’re very important to have. Especially for extended trips.

We were able to visit a good friend there. Some might say she’s noble. IFYKYK.
With the help of the hotel, we scheduled someone to come pick us up in the morning to head out to the airport. Now the real journey begins.