New York City Jet Blues

I recently returned from a short trip to New York City. It was my first visit to the Big Apple and came at the invitation of someone there that I am working with on one of my many volunteer projects. Since I was only there for 2 days I didn't get to see all of the city, but I was able to get around midtown Manhattan and see Times Square, Rockefeller Plaza, Central Park, and the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I also got to spend some time in Greenwich Village as that was where my meeting was.

New York is an interesting place to be sure. There is, as the song goes, some "magic in the air." I noticed that the pedestrians in New York are not shy about cross the street on a red light. Man, if you do that in San Francisco you're likely going to get run over. The traffic, both in Manhattan and to and from JFK, was as crowded as any freeway here, though in Manhattan the traffic is almost all taxis and trucks. I was surprised to see that not all of Manhattan consists of skyscrapers. Indeed, between the Empire State Building and lower Manhattan (where Wall Street is) there are hardly any buildings taller than a few stories.

The flight to New York was fine, but the flight back was a 9-1/2 ordeal. I got stuck in a middle seat, though I managed to get in a exit row so I had some leg room to work with. Then the flight had to be diverted to Denver because there wasn't enough fuel to make it all the way to Oakland. Seriously, the plane was running out of gas. Because of the diversion we flew through an area of rough turbulence that had me reaching for the Dramamine. When we landed the pilot said that the "gas and go" would only take about 20 minutes. The fueling itself took 45. The ground crew decided to clean out the septic tanks while we were there, but one of the values broke, so we were stuck for another 30 minutes while they fixed that. Then, because we were on the ground for so long they had to de-ice the plane before we took off. Why they didn't think of that (we were landing in Denver after all!) is beyond me. So the 20 minute delay ended up being close to 2 hours by the time we landed in Oakland. And get this, you would think that they would have served free drinks to us to compensate for the delay, but nope, they were still charging for the drinks and they didn't do a second snack service even though everyone had missed their dinners because of this nonsense. This will be the last time that I fly JetBlue (there, I said it) t0 New York.

There, I feel better now.