Autumn in New York, anyone?
As I alluded with my last post, my “I’ll just fly up to see Bon Jovi” tour got extended. Then overextended.
Started innocently enough. I wanted to fly up on Friday instead of Saturday, so I could catch Coney Island fireworks that only run through July, I believe. (WORTH IT.)
I remember thinking, OK, great. I’ll fly home Wednesday and be happy.
Well.
I got a message from Delta in the middle of the night Tuesday that my flight was canceled due to weather.
Spent some time dicking around with Delta and a few other travel sites.
Second best case was to wait a day and try to do standby. Which of course is not guaranteed.
And as lovely as the Centurion Lounge is, there are time limits.
Third best case was to grab any flight that wasn’t going directly south. But I was looking at 3-4 stops to such scintillating Delta hubs as Detroit, Charlotte, Raleigh, Altlanta and/or Dulles.
Fourth best case was take a JetBlue flight on Thursday … for over $900. (When I could reschedule with Delta for free.)
Best case was to say fuck it, pay the CitizenM for two more nights, and call it PTO.
That was an adventure. Between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., the Marriott site went from $600 a night to no availability.
The CitizenM guys told me to just go have breakfast, check out of my room at 11, and then hit the website right after 11.
They said they were booked solid BUT obviously if I couldn’t get out of town, people weren’t going to be able to come IN.
Hilariously, I packed all my shit from the past five days. Checked out. Opened my laptop. Secured a reservation for $350 a night. Checked immediately back in TO THE SAME ROOM.
To be fair, they didn’t tell me to pack my shit. But still, the odds of getting the “501 blues” after being TOLD I’d get a different room was closer to zero percent than 100.
Anyway, I’ve never stayed in NYC that long. And I never wanted to leave.
Honestly, as I furiously typed my newsletter from the Centurion Lounge on Friday, I truly thought, what if Eduardo put the cats on a flight and we stayed there forever?
I realize I do that with every vacation. Start looking at real estate.
But now that I’ve un-subbed from all my Orlando searches … and my fucking airport is “the airport formerly known as PBI” because it’s now named after a PEDOPHILE and CONVICTED RAPIST … I mean, why not turn my annual visits into permanent ones?
I’ve never seen NYC in the autumn, after all.