...and Lead us Not into Penn Station

I was a kid in Jersey in the 70's and New York was that scary place to the east. You might visit, but you damn well better have known where you were going and gone directly there without looking to the left or right along the way because who knew what you might have seen and how it might have scarred your precious bucolic view of the world in general. So, now, I am older and New York is gentler. But, thoughts put into one's head when one is at an impressionable age don't just fade away. So, it was with a degree of trepidation that I walked out of and closed the door to Dan and Leslie's place on Friday morning - leaving my key behind, dragging all of my possessions behind me in my carry-on and taking on Manhattan alone.

Luckily, I got no farther than the elevator outside their door before I confessed my unease to a total stranger who was waiting for the elevator with me. "Good morning this is not my place it's my sister-in-law's and I have to go work now and I have to get to the client and I have never hailed a cab before and it's a little freaky for me." I guess I looked an appropriate combination of "normal enough" and "needy out-of-towner" that the kind man offered to walk me to a sufficiently-cab-friendly artery and then he actually did the requisite flagging-down. (Not that I couldn't have done it by myself, mind you, but I was appreciative, if not blatantly embarrassed. This is what happens when the person who used to be on the road for work as much as I was home moves west, settles down in a land best summed-up as "unincorporated" and starts working part-time in her pajamas for a few years.)



Anyway, the cab ride was uneventful, save some traffic in Times Square - which actually provided a few minutes of sight-seeing. After a short workday, I was off again walking to Penn Station dragging my belongings behind me like Mags drags her soft blanket - with stolen glances behind me at regular intervals to make sure no stealthy ne'er-do-well pedestrian had sidled up too closely to my stuff. The previous day I had wandered over to Grand Central Station, which is glorious and obvious in its architecture and attitude. Penn Station, unless I missed the front entrance somehow, really just exists below ground. There are buildings above and they hint at the fact that there's a portal to the underworld below - there are a sign or two that say "LIRR" or "Train" or what have you, but I kind of just walked in a door and descended into the ground. I got in at an area that served the Long Island Railroad and just hoped that by walking for long enough I would eventually see a sign for New Jersey Transit. I did and made my way over there. The other "carriers" seemed to have manned ticket counters, but NJ Transit has only self-serve machines, and the Information desk had a little laminated sign on it that read, "Be Back in 30 Minutes." So, I grabbed a train schedule (seriously, click the link -it's CRAZY), put my glasses on, reminded myself that I am at least as smart as the average person and determined that I would figure it out. No simple task, if I do say so. But so rewarding once I was actually zipping in air conditioned comfort toward the Garden State...