Last year at this time, Anne and I were preparing to travel to New York. John G. instigated this trip.  Along with John and his brother Jim, we joined Don and DJ there.  The expressed purpose of this trip was a bike ride, the Tour of the Five Boroughs.  A lot of things went wrong, but I’d still like to go back sometime.

John, Don, DJ, Anne and I all hail from Saint Louis.  Jim lives near Philly.  Pretty much everything that went wrong about our trip was weather related.  Coming from Saint Louis with its southern summers and northern winters, throwing rocks at some other city’s weather, is like living in a glass house.  Our main problems involved getting to NYC and then riding the bike ride.  Both of these occasions involved a lot of rain.

We had planned to fly to NYC on Friday morning, but it was socked-in.  I wasted a vacation day in the Saint Louis airport terminal, waiting for our flight to depart.  Since we had planned to arrive about noon on Friday, I thought that there was more than enough of a cushion to permit buying Broadway theater tickets for Friday night, even the absolutely non-refundable kind.  When we finally got a departure time from Saint Louis and when I learned that our scheduled arrival time was at curtain call, I called the theatrical booking agency and threw myself on the mercy of the court.  Low and behold it worked!  We got our tickets moved to Saturday.  Did I mention that Anne had a cold and would have been much happier back home in bed?  Oh, and there was that swine flu scare that I also forgot to mention.  A not very auspicious beginning.

Sunday, the other rain event was the bike ride itself.  The rain began shortly after the ride began and continued steadily almost until its end.  We did have a few nice miles though.  On Saturday evening, at Battery Park, we picked up the bikes and rode them back to Times Square, most of the way on bike trail.  My favorite riding experience was Sunday morning at 5 AM, but I’m kind of partial to that time anyway.  We launched from our hotel in the theater district and rode down Broadway, until we hit 5^th Avenue and took that to the 5-Boro Ride’s starting point.  It was a pretty cool ride.

So we had some bad weather, that didn’t succeed in dampening our spirits.  It was great having friends to share this travel experience with.  John and Jim come from a Chinese restaurant family, so having them both act as our own personal maître de team at a Chinatown dim song restaurant was stupendous.  Later, Don and DJ toured Soho with us.  We were oh so trendy that afternoon.  Even though we quickly split apart, it was nice to know that among our newest 40,000 friends, there were four friends that we would meet again.  At the after ride supper, all cleaned up and with a little more gas in the tank, it was great to hear everyone else’s stories of the ride.

We have plenty of friends and fun here in Saint Louis.  You don’t need to travel to finds those things.  Part of the travel experience is to experience new things.  We glimpsed, at least from afar, all of NYC’s major attractions.  I was pleased that Geoffrey Rush won best actor at this year’s Tony Awards for his role in Exit the King.  What I loved most about our trip, were the little things, the things to small to even enumerate, let alone describe in this already too long post.