Prior to last Wednesday, I had never been to New York City. It was a place that was at the very top of my bucket list. So many of my favorite movies and t.v. shows are set there. “You’ve Got Mail”, “The Devil Wears Prada”, “Julie & Julia”, “Working Girl”, “Friends”, “Will & Grace” are the ones I immediately think of because I routinely watch these movies and shows over and over. They never get old. From watching them I developed this sort of romantic fantasy kind of idea that living in New York City would be so cool. I wanted to take the subway and experience all the different kind of people on the ride. I wanted a funky little apartment above a pizza place or some other business and have to walk to the corner store to get things. I wanted to have a favorite hole-in-the-wall kind of restaurant or deli to frequent. I wanted to be surrounded by all the culture that seemed to be in so many corners of the city. In my mind, New York City presented an entirely different way of life. I’m from the south and while I do live in the fifth largest city in my state, it is not NYC by any means.
Then last Wednesday, on my road trip to Boston to pick up a friend before driving her across New York to Syracuse so we could both attend our annual knitting camp, my gps screwed me over. I was on interstate 95 for the entire drive that day. The hotel I picked for staying the night in Connecticut was just off the interstate and not far past New York City. I was excited about driving near the big city I had always dreamed of visiting. But as I approached the end of the New Jersey turnpike, I realized that it was somewhere between 5 and 6 p.m. Rush hour. And my gps decided that for some reason, getting off the interstate, driving over the George Washington bridge and through Manhattan and then merging back onto the interstate would be a good idea. It wasn’t. It did not save me time, which I thought was always the point of using a gps app. What it did do was make me completely change my view of New York City. When I first got off the interstate and began to get closer to the bridge, I saw the infamous skyline. I could make out One World Trade Center in the distance and I admit, I took a few quick pictures while driving. Well, not really driving, rather putting less pressure on the brake pedal so my car could inch forward. I quickly realized that I needed to keep both hands on the wheel and really pay attention to how I was maneuvering my car. And apparently, I was not moving my car the way people thought I should have. An 18-wheeler forced me out of my lane as he tried to get around an accident on the lane farthest from me that I didn’t even see. I had to drive on the shoulder and then cut back in front of him so I wouldn’t be stuck outside of the lane. For that, I got honked at. There was, in fact, a lot of honking during this harrowing experience and I was too scared to take a hand off 10 and 2 to return the honking.
After getting off the bridge, I saw the “welcome to Manhattan” sign and had a moment of panic because I did not intend to drive through Manhattan. But there I was. There were people walking up and down along the concrete median with coolers selling fruit. There were Door Dash drivers on scooters zooming between the lanes of cars, not in any particular lane themselves. At one point, an empty potato chip bag flew onto my side view mirror where it remained for about two miles. Again, I was too tense and afraid to put my window down to knock the bag off. I was too tense and afraid to really do anything other than keep a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel and tighten up my shoulders with my eyes straight ahead. I didn’t dare to even glance over at my phone mounted on the dashboard to see if I was getting closer to being back on the interstate.
Eventually I did get back onto the interstate and I breathed a hefty sigh of relief. I’m sure that seemingly endless experience contributed to the pain I felt in my body the next day. Never mind that I had been in my car for 12 hours continuously driving that day.
I don’t know why gps took me through the city like that. I don’t know why I didn’t ignore the initial direction to get off the interstate and let it reroute me around that nightmare. But what I do know is that now that I have experienced a tiny blip of the city, I don’t feel quite the same romanticism about New York. Did I mention earlier that it was on my bucket list? Eh, never mind.
Leave a Reply