Back from The Big Apple

Levi and I finally made it back from NYC late last Sunday night and I’ve been recuperating from our trip home ever since. If you ever go there to see the New York Marathon, don’t make plans to leave the same day. When we booked our flight home, we didn’t realize Levi’s dad would be starting the race so late. Most marathons start early, about 6 a.m., but since there were so many people at this marathon, there were multiple start times and his dad happened to get the 10 a.m. start. Our flight left at 6:25 p.m. and we didn’t find his dad in the crowd after the marathon until 3:30 p.m. This didn’t seem to be too big of a problem because we had planned to allow two hours to get to the airport, which was only a 15-minute cab ride away from the apartment where we were staying, or so we thought.

When we tried to call to reserve a cab, they said they weren’t reserving them in our area (one block from Central Park) until 7 p.m. that night. We didn’t let that deter us; we just decided to hail a cab. No big deal – they do it all the time in movies. I have to say that hailing a cab in Manhattan after the Marathon ends in Central Park is a nightmare. All but one of the cabs were full shuttling marathoners to their hotels, and the one empty one refused to drive us out to the airport. At this point we started to panic.

It was 4:45 and we had about an hour and a half before our flight left. We decided to take the subway to Grand Central Station because we knew there would be cabs there. Unfortunately, the subway took twice as long to get there because it stopped longer at each stop for all the people. We finally got to Grand Central Station and got a cab to the airport about 5:50. By the time we got through all the traffic to the airport, we walked in the airport doors to the sound of the intercom saying “Levi and Emily Wilkins, this is your final call, please proceed to the gate immediately.” We had no boarding passes and hadn’t been through security. We felt so defeated because we had worked so hard to make it on time. Thankfully, they were able to put us on standby on the next flight, which conveniently still made our connection in Dallas. We finally got home about 12:30 that night after our good friends Ann and Trent picked us up at the airport.

Despite our travel frustrations, we had a great time in NYC. We were able to cram most of the tourist attractions into the short 2.5 days we were there. We saw the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Ground Zero, Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange, the famous Wall Street Bull, and got in a full day of shopping on Fifth and Madison Avenues. I’m already looking forward to going back next year when Levi will be running the marathon!