The Longest Day

As you all know, the summer solstice (midsummer night) is on 20/21 June. That makes yesterday the longest day.

What you may not have realised, was that yesterday was also the day I travelled from Morgantown to New York. This trip normally takes 9 hours by car or two times 1 hour by plane (change at DC). Sadly, I took the latter option.

Due to technical faults with our plane, which was still stuck somewhere in the wilds of WV, our flight to DC was four to five hours delayed. Then it was cancelled, then it was delayed again and finally it was truly cancelled.

As it turned out, we finally did get flown to DC on the next flight (which they initially claimed to be full) and from there United booked us onto a Delta flight into JFK. Sadly, though, upon arrival in Dulles airport (DC), the Delta people told us their flight was (like any other flight) heavily overbooked and so there was no way in hell that we'd get onto that flight - or any other flight - to NYC.

So back to United. The only thing they did was wave their hands in the air and say there's nothing they can do, all flights are overbooked, what do we expect them to do? (Getting us to NY would be a good start, given that we paid them to do that.)

Along with two other passengers (both Long Islanders), I then decided to rent a car and drive from DC to NY - as soon as we had lunch (which really ended up being dinner). Luckily, by the time we had had lunch, the Delta flight was also heavily delayed - which apparently resulted in some people cancelling (and going by car?) - ergo, we got a spot on the plane after all. (The plane subsequently sat around on the tarmac for an hour and a half because NY had stopped allowing planes to land or something like that, but at least we made it to NYC eventually.)

And remarkably, so did my luggage (though they've lost the baggage strap around my suitcase and they seriously destroyed my fancy Qantas baggage tag.)

Taking the airtrain and subway into the centre of the city was easy enough and I think I arrived there at around 11pm. The plane landed around 10pm which means that simply to get from Morgantown airport to JFK airport (which should reportedly be a 9-hour drive), I spend about 12 hours. Talking about flying as a fast mode of transportation!

Sadly, though, my memory deluded me when trying to track down the hostel, so I spent the next two hours dragging my suitcase through Manhattan (and through a drizzle which is too weak to be rain but persistent enough to make my glasses untransparent). At 1 am I finally arrived at the hostel. I had in the meantime tried to get a taxi to take me there, but the driver had never even heard of "youth hostels". Luckily a random passer by (at 12:30am!) did know the address.

And then of course you get the checking-in trouble. God knows why, but apparently my name had entered the system wrongly, so after they told me that a) I didn't have a booking and b) the hostel was 100% fully booked (which isn't quite what you want to hear at 1:30am after the day I've just described), it took me about half an hour to convince them I did have a booking and for them to get me a bed. At 2:30 I finally fell asleep. (Only to be woken up by the bl**dy Sun at 8 am of course. Which is the second day in a row since last night I was desperately trying to get my laptop to behave correctly again.)


On a positive note, I really, really like New York (or the West end of Manhattan at least, since that's all I've really seen so far), notwithstanding all of the above. More on that later, because now I need to get ready for the conference registration.