Day 19: Travel Day
Welcome
Yesterday we travelled from LA to New York.
Our day began with the journey to LAX, a drive across Los Angeles that took us the best part of an hour and somehow mostly excluded the use of freeways on our route. We said goodbye to Jake and headed into the terminal, checking our bags and passing through security surprisingly quickly for this bloated behemoth of an airport. I had breakfast in the United Lounge, putting together a green salad from the buffet and augmenting this cold selection of vegetables with a warm bowl of Miso soup filled with noodles, spring onions, and bok choi.
At 1pm we took off in a United Airlines Boeing 787, our two confident pilots climbing into the skies over LA and pointing the nose east towards our destination on the other side of the continent. We were seated separately on the flight so I can’t tell you what everyone else got up to on this five hours of confinement but I spent most of the flight catching up on blog writing as well as doing a bit of reading as a special treat.
We landed to find that Newark airport was shrouded in darkness, quite a disorientating feeling considering that our body clocks were ready to enjoy a Pacific coast golden hour. Disembarking through the air bridge we immediately felt the cold of an east coast autumn and once we were out of the terminal, I regretted my decision to travel in shorts. We had to pick up our rental car and finally, we got to travel on a proper monorail. Unlike most of the airports we have recently visited with people mover systems that utilise rail carriages riding on rubber car tyres, AirTrain Newark looks like a system from the future; an efficient single rail that is gobbled into the train’s mouth and spat out the other end, propelling us along smoothly and safely. It was a slightly scary ride in the end; the carriage wobbled while cornering and it reminded me a lot of riding an old roller coaster - but any experience of visiting an iconic piece of transport infrastructure is a good one and I’m glad we got to see it before it gets replaced due to its terrible reliability problems.
“Yum”
📸 Wikimedia - Schvaxet
If you wanted to participate in a new game, you had better get ready to do some guessing. Four Beths and one Gabe picked up our rental vehicle from Enterprise Rentals at Newark Airport. Our equipment was shipped directly to the venue, so we were only carrying personal suitcases and an acoustic guitar. If you think you know what kind of vehicle we picked up leave a comment below. The winner could receive up to one hundred boints.
Tristan drove us out of the airport, taking the Pulaski Skyway past Jersey City and then the Holland Tunnel to get under the Hudson and into Lower Manhattan. From there we crossed the East River and crawled the rest of the way through the streets of Brooklyn until we reached our accommodation in Crown Heights, which if you don’t know New York very well is right next to where it says the name BROOKLYN in a large font on Google maps. This would have been a very satisfying end to the day as it was 11pm EST and we were all excited about bedding down for the night. Instead, we dealt with the challenge of being locked out of our Airbnb, a problem that was all the more frustrating since we couldn’t reach the owner and the instructions wanted us to install useless app to operate the lock. On top of this none of us had eaten since breakfast thanks to the slightly awkward timing of our flight.
A division of labour was implemented with Tristan, Gabe, and I heading out to search for a takeaway shop that was still open and Jon and Liz focusing on the more serious problem of entry into our shelter. It was nearly half an hour later and we had just picked up our food when we received a message informing us of their success. The electronic lock on the front door that had been confounding us with its indignant beeping noise had been defeated by a resourceful Jonathan Pearce. It turns out that the lock had run out of batteries and Jon had managed to power it up using a 9-volt battery and then was able to input the code. A grateful group of travellers made their way inside and out of the cold, enjoying the comfort of a deliciously unhealthy meal in the comfort of a sparsely furnished apartment.