East Coast Travel

So for those of you who don't know I made a trip east the past few days. The trip began with a flight from St. Louis to Newark, NJ. In Newark I went and got a rental car which I had priceline'd Monday evening. It was the cheapest/easiest alternative I had to store my bags, without having to take a car too/from Parssippany NJ where my hotel for Tuesday night was located. It also saved me a couple of hours of travel time, and waiting for a car service.

After getting the car, I loaded in my two bags and headed off to the daily parking lot at the airport, from there I took the train into NYC. I ended up at Penn Station in NYC, so I headed up stairs to make it out into the city. I walked quite a ways around the Madison Square Garden area before heading back to the Subway and up towards Times Square. At Times Square I saw the famous Naked Cowboy, at first I felt a little weird taking pictures of a guy standing there in his underwear strumming his guitar, but really, who am I to judge a guy for making a name for himself?

From there I wandered around the city for a while, eventually making my way up Park Ave and a few other famous streets, passing Trump Tower as well as landing myself in FAO Schwartz. Wow what a toy store!

After that I headed off to try and locate myself a subway line so I could head up to Yankee Stadium to the baseball game (the original reason I was on the trip). I walked I don't know how many blocks before finally giving up and breaking out my map, only to figure out I wasn't close to where I needed to be, so I walked another 15 to 20 blocks to get to the #4 line that I could take up to the stadium.

Before the game I met up with my Aunt (my Red Sox partner!), her Cousin (Aunt Trisha) and Trisha's Nephew TJ (we haven't seen each other in probably 20+ years). We hung out at the McDonald's across the street, sitting in a booth with the wobbliest table I have ever seen in my life. Then we waited more, and more, and more. We were outside of the stadium about 25 minutes before the gates were to open, once opened we waited in line to walk through Monument Park there in the outfield of Yankee Stadium. It was worth the wait, though more so because we got to be so close to the Red Sox bullpen than actually seeing some silly Yankee monuments ;)

After the walk through the park we started to make our way off to the seats, which we weren't quite sure of their location. When we got there we had to do a double take, we were in the first row in right field, I figured we would be 2nd row at best, and most likely 1 or 2 levels up, this was not the case, we were on the lowest level as close to the field as you could get in the stadium seats, the only seats closer were some folding chairs in front of us.

The game was great, it was my first and only time to the old Yankee Stadium which is being replaced with a new stadium next year. It was good to see a Red Sox win, and it is always good to see the Yankees lose, especially to the Sox! After the game I dashed out of the stadium and back to the Subway so I could start my trek back to New Jersey. I took the Subway back to Penn Station, the NJ Transit train (as the doors were closing) back to the airport, the tram back to the parking garage and then the rental car to my hotel. I think I got into my room at the hotel around 1am.

At 7am I was back up and running, getting ready for a day of DotNetNuke Training for a client there in Parssippany NJ. After the training we went out to dinner then I made my way back to the airport yet again. The flight was similar to the flight from St. Louis, same sized plane (3 seats across), but this time, instead of everything being speedy, we sat on the tarmac for an hour! The pilot didn't bother to tell us why, but it ended up we were mainly in a long line of planes trying to take off, my assumption was the Newark only had one runway open for take offs on Wednesday night, why I am not sure.

Even with the hour long delay, we still managed to land on time in St. Louis, which surprised Natalie when I called and woke her up an hour earlier than she was planning!

All in all it was a great trip, I look forward to going back to the New York area again soon!

You can check out all the photos I've posted from the trip with this Flickr Set.