8:30 in the morning came way too early. I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone to get our morning Cokes. We got on the train into town and got off to get some Ess-a-Bagel. Unfortunately, the cross streets I had written down for it were incorrect. My Google Maps mashup of Famous Fat Dave’s favorites had addresses in the titles (the only thing I had printed out, and Sydney doesn’t have a printer), when what you really need to navigate in New York is cross streets and a Street Wise map (highly recommended). So after walking six or so blocks to nowhere,…
We got a later start on Friday than we’d intended, but we’d been up so late the night before. After everyone got a shower, Sydney, her roommate, Todd, Berck, and I walked to Tom’s Restaurant south of Syd’s brownstone in Brooklyn. Famous Fat Dave had not steered us wrong; the waffles and home fries were exceptional. I had a Belgian waffle with ice cream, whip cream, syrup, and cinnamon butter. Tom’s is strange because they hand out orange slices and cookies before taking your order. Then there were post-breakfast cookies and lollipops. Todd had forgotten his wallet and MetroPass, so…
The Ani DiFranco concert on Wednesday night was fun. Deciding to cut through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and Prospect Park, we navigated according to my compass along paths that kept winding the wrong way. Little directional signs at intersections weren’t a whole lot of help; one pointed the direction we were going, while the next pointed the opposite. We finally realized that if we just followed the short-haired girls with lots of piercings, they’d take us directly to the band shell. Then we relaxed out on the grass while the two opening acts played (both of them Ani wannabes), drank…
I think my clothes are half drenched in sweat. Part of it is the rain that’s gently falling here, which, according to the natives, has cooled things down tremendously. I’ll take their word for it. This morning the rain wasn’t falling so gently. The radar showed a mass of red and PURPLE (for hail, the weatherman kept warning) was centered over New York City. I know this because our JetBlue flight, which left nearly an hour late from Denver at 1:40am, has TV, and I was flipping back and forth between the two local stations it carried. Then I flipped…