Here we are in New York…actually, somewhere “near” New York City on Long Island a couple blocks down the road from JFK International Airport….actually, in the bar of the Radisson Hotel down the road from JFK (see accompanying photos this date). Lennie figures she hasn’t slept for 48 hours, although it’s probably closer to 30, which is still a long time to not sleep. Doug knows he slept because of the dream he had about Lennie, which he hasn’t told her about yet. BTW, the Hawaiian Air flight had THE worst seats ever in our experience; they had no “give” and felt like you were sitting on a 2X10 all night long. We’re now figuring out how to avoid a similar seat debacle on the final leg of our trip back to Honolulu in four weeks. (Travelers Tip: Check in early enough -- like three hours before the flight -- on Hawaiian Air and you might snag seats in an exit row, which was the only redeeming factor of that Honolulu-Phoenix flight.)
Had a good seatmate (in addition to Lennie) on the Phoenix-JFK flight. Steve (last name unknown, but he has Doug's card and will write) works for Parsons Engineering, based in Pasadena, CA. He focuses on transit projects, including the Big Dig in Boston, so who knows? Maybe we’ll meet up again on the future Honolulu rapid transit project. Uh huh.
About the pictures: First stop after getting into our room was to the fabulous Radisson JFK bar, where we found the ambiance consists of muted MSNBC on the tube and some raucous radio station on the mini-entertainment center. The bartenderess disappeared frequently for minutes at a time, but we managed to have her snap our photo with no-vermouth martinis, triple-olive. We think we caught up on the latest about the missing Alabama coed in Aruba and what the Michael Jackson jurors had to say, but we’re not sure what we saw because of the mute and the scant information in the crawls across the bottom of the screen. We’re going to check out the news during the evening hours while we eat the room-service soup and California Plate.
Too much irrelevant detail? You ain't seen nothing yet! Tomorrow, a subway trip into Manhattan, and maybe the subway back to the airport, but a taxi still is a $45 (plus tax and tip) possibility. It’s really hot and humid, feels like an oven, so we may spend an inordinate amount of time inside Bloomingdale’s. We leave at 9 p.m. for Zurich via American Airlines, which we hope has at least 2X12 seating.
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