"Excellent".
It's been mission, "find & get a truck ASAP" cause in his words, "I can't work like this". Understandable! The short story is we found one in New York and finally had all the stuff we needed to go purchase and pick it up yesterday morning @ 10am. We left immediately!
Drive up through NJ was easy driving, all together in one car and the two year old in the back is an excellent traveler, who I should also applaud just starting potty training a little over a week ago and gave us no accidents the whole day!
Through the Holland Tunnel and BAM! when you come out you are in New York City! Basically seems like more people and cars than there is square footage of space to move...."lock the doors"....NOW! Big trucks way to close to us, natives making traffic lanes where there aren't supposed to be traffic lanes, people walking EVERYWHERE, a homeless guy just laying in the middle of a sidewalk as people walk around him. Sad!
"Watch out!" Almost got clipped and a guy in the road stops to wipe the scuff marks off his white sneakers.
It's not for everyone, we love our slice of Ephrata. Although, I would imagine that you would not feel alone there (at least in the physical sense) which I suppose might be a comforting feeling in some ways. We pass a random vendor selling belts along the side of the road...that's it, just belts. Wondered how many belts you have to sell each day to make that work out for you?
Evan loved the BIGness of it all. The bridges, the tunnels, the multi-level roads criss-crossing each othe, the planes, the trucks. OH the trucks! Especially when we took the truck route and we were the ONLY passenger car in the lineup! Oh my! I thought we suddenly looked extra small!And then suddenly we were back in the "suburbs" and staring at this enormous truck we were going to buy! "Oh my gosh it's gigantic!
Ok looks great! Purchase and we are off. But not before they tell us that traffic is going to be a nightmare. Gee thanks! Off to the Bronx! Back through the city, now driving a commercial vehicle and lots of signs saying passenger cars only:( Funny how we hadn't noticed them before. Thank you God there was an angel at the BP station that helped us figure out where we could drive to continue on our way, but not before a guy with a coffee cup knocked on my window begging for money at a very SLOW and nasty stop light. Seriously buddy! I almost just had a heart attack right there! I used an inhaler for the first time today! More bridges, tolls, tolls and more tolls. Cars EVERYWHERE and close calls with them. Josh has got our cell phones GPS's velcroed to the dash and we are on speaker phone with each other the length of the trip and we finally get outside the city to a Home Depot where we can park this beast! Because wait, we haven't been through enough yet. We're actually going to go back in there and attempt a Yankees game! We leave our new (new to us) commercial truck in the middle of nowhere and hope we find our way back to it with this handy little street address we got off our phones. I hadn't yet prepared myself well enough to pay out the nose in the next hour. I'm not sure how people survive in New York City, I think there is even a fee for standing still!
Ok but here is my tip of the day. Ready? You do NOT go to a Yankees game wearing any other team logo or speak badly of the home team. There was this guy behind us that made this mistake and let's just say a very large section of the stadium was chanting some unkind words and sending him some unkind messages for an extended amount of time. He definitely was not helping himself with his retaliation attempts. I am pretty sure the night didn't end well for that guy! He had a lot of enemies and they looked mean! We headed out! We saw them win division championships and booked it to get my Jeep from the garage before the other fifty thousand people left the stadium, easy sailing out of the city beating all the traffic and found the truck, still with all its tires and other important parts! Yay! Headed home following Josh, now down one cell phone and exhausted. Josh had a tail light out and we pull over to get some coffee, as does the cop that is pulling me over! Excellent! Apparently, my brake lights were out and there is dense fog. He gifts me with a ticket and tells me that I shouldn't drive it anymore. Well the truck only has two seats, there are three of us and McDonalds doesn't have sleeping quarters. It was sometime after midnight. I thank him and admire my brand new souvenir! Josh appears at my window with an iced frappe and finds one extra bulb in the glove compartment and we drive away VERY cautiously and I tried to avoid using my brakes. In hindsight, we thought it was divine intervention that I was the one that got pulled over being that Josh was carrying a weapon last night! Not sure how that would have gone over when he disclosed that he was carrying a firearm, even with his license to carry! Oh dear God! I am so glad we prayed in the driveway before we left! More hours of driving, energy drinks, eye drops, stumbling into a Hess station where I thought about doing jumping jacks and opted for cold water in the face instead and completely obstructing my view of what time it was all night.
Finally rolling to a halt, only by the grace of God, beside the garage at 2:35 this morning was almost a miracle. Still shaking from all the energy drinks and the brisk air that had been slapping me in the face to keep me awake the last hour, I kissed the ground and passed out on my pillow! That ranks right up there with some of the craziest things we've ever done! Checked it right off of my list of things we are NEVER doing again! (Definitely in favor of going back to New York...just not in the same fashion we did yesterday:)) T'was a fun day though! Making memories every step of the journey and arrived home safely with our precious cargo, which was all we had asked for anyway! Love my life with my guys! Wouldn't trade the experiences we've had for any other in the world! Sure is good to be home though!
