Category Archives: Travel Tribulations

Crazie Toad’s Wild Ride

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I am back in Crazie Town after a whirlwind trip to New York City.

Crazie Town's Sister City

I cleaned out my purse when I got home and here’s what I found.

**Boarding pass for the flight where I’m pretty sure I slept so hard I drooled on myself.

**My ticket stub to Rising Stars.  The Laguardia High School for the Arts annual talent show.  It was AMAZing.  One guy came on stage and played guitar like I’ve never seen. He transported himself and the audience to another space and time.  And, oh yeah, he’s 15 and he’s going to Laguardia for his art, he just plays the guitar for fun.

**A shuttle pass to get me from one subway station to another.  The “L” was closed for the weekend and I was trying to get to Brooklyn to visit one of my brothers.  I was with a friend who valiantly attempted over and over again to get us there on the subway but we finally bailed and climbed into a cab.

We gave him the address and he said “Where’s that?”

I paused and said, “I have no idea,”

“Well,” he said.  “You’re the one who wants to go there, not me.”

**The receipt for the craziest most useless watch I’ve ever purchased.

**A ticket stub to the Natural History Museum.  While holding my 7-year-old niece’s hand she said “Mimi, when I see a caveman it makes me want to learn about dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs make me want to learn about rocks.  And, rocks make me want to learn about outer space.”  As for me, I was just trying to make to the food court to get a snack.

**Drawing of me and said niece as mermaids.

**Restaurant receipt for a local diner where I ended up eating breakfast twice in one day. Once at 9 am and once at midnight.

**Hand written directions for a car service.  I seem to have the worse Car Karma ever.  My friend told me she’d ordered a car for me to take me to the film site where my brother was shooting Person of Interest.

“No problem,” she said.  “They know where it is and they have GPS if they get lost.”

I climb into the waiting (GPS free) car and the first words of broken English out of his mouth were.  “Where are we going?”  Thank goodness for smart phones as I looked up the location on the internet and wrote them out for him.  He was so diligent about taking me to the exact address that he drove onto the set to let me out.

**The program for Now.Here.This.  Another brother is the musical director of this Off-Broadway play and I got to attend the first preview of it.  Not to brag, but it was the best musically directed play I’ve ever seen.

In between all of this, I walked approximately 400 miles of concrete sidewalks, I changed sleeping quarters five times, I learned how to take the subway all by myself and, sadly, I discovered a book about monsters that appears to be almost an exact duplicate of the children’s book I’ve been working on for two years.

It was a wild ride and although I loved every minute of it, I am happy to be home where I can look out my office window and see green grass, where I can drive my car the 50 yards from one store to the other, and yes, my dear friends at WTF Critique group, where I can finish the last few paragraphs of my book.

 

 

Tick*Nick*Al Difficulties

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A year ago I would not have been able to tell you the difference between a Tweet and a Twat.  Actually, I still couldn’t tell you what a Twat is.  Oh dear, I just looked it up… so….anyway…..

My mom had a great saying about forgetting things when you travel.  “If I have my credit card and a tube of lipstick I can go anywhere.”  Which has been true for me for years.  I have now amended that to credit card, lipstick, and IPhone.

I’m in New York for a visit and just “knew” that at some point I’d whip out my IPhone at a funky coffee shop and dash off my blog.  Except I had a wifi breakdown.  I’m one of those people who know what my phone should be able to do, I just don’t know how to make it do it.  So, no blog on Sunday like I planned, sorry about that.

I’m having a wonderful time here but, really…what’s with all the walking people?  I get in my car to drive from one side of a parking lot to another, so watching my nephew and his wife bring four little girls from their home in Queens to Manhattan on the subway was, for me, like watching an astronaut walk on the moon.  I was mesmerized, but I certainly wouldn’t want to do it.

I’m sitting in the kitchen of my brother’s Manhattan apartment (don’t’ get excited, it’s the size of a postage stamp) where we’ll be leaving shortly so he can go to rehearsals for a show he’s working on.  I plan to shop at some sort of discount store called Daffy’s (love the name) and then we’re taking the subway to Brooklyn to watch another brother film an episode of Person of Interest.  After that, we’ll walk around the “hipster” part of town and have a late dinner.  I mean, late for a midwesterner.  The way I figure it, we’ll be eating dinner about the time I’d normally be falling into my deep REM sleep.

One day soon, I will figure out how to post to this blog from my IPhone, and then I’ll figure out how to Tweet and then I’ll figure out how to finish my novel and then I’ll be rich.  Or I’ll be a twat (I’m talking about the person who’s stupid definition, not the vulgar slang for a woman’s genitals kind of person)