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Notes from travelling
Aug. 27th, 2004 09:25 pmOn Saturday, August 14, I left for NY with my boss Ann and co-worker Karen to go to the NY Int'l Gift Show. It was fun but fairly uneventful. This is the second time I've been to this show, which is huge and overwhelming and quite the scene. We stayed on the 40th floor of the hotel, which made me queasy for the first day, then after one night's sleep, I adapted to the city and all its craziness and was fine for the next few days. Not that I would want to live there, that's for damn sure. But it's fun to go and eat amazing gourmet food and try grappe (acquired taste...eeeeeuw) and have cappucino after supper every day. Plus the hotels have some kind of interesting decor..."The W", where one of our friends stayed, has an entranceway with a glass ceiling which is lit and has water moving through it; it looks like you're walking into an aquarium. Their lobby and bar are on the seventh floor, and the bar has white leather couches that are about a foot high, so you can feel like an ancient Roman while you have your cocktail. I personally prefer the lobby of the Paramount, though, which somehow makes me think of the Hotel California. Sort of Gothy. I'm trying to get Ann to let us stay there.
I was home for about 24 hours in the middle of the week, then M and I packed up to go to the Cape for the craft fair that I wasn't supposed to be in. We didn't pull into TH's camp until after midnight on Thursday, and had to get up at 6:30 to get set up in Chatham.
Then the fun began. Sort of literally.
On Friday night, we missed a crucial turn when attempting to leave Chatham, and ended up going south on Rte 28. No problem, thought we, we'll just pick up the highway a little farther west than we meant to. Except it didn't exactly work that way...apparently that section of Rte 28 goes DUE NORTH even though the sign says South. So we ended up in Orleans, even farther from home, trying to get directions from a great Jamaican guy at the Cumberland Farms who kept inviting us to stay with "our friend in Orleans next time." Ooooo, which friend is that, buddy? It was very amusing, we thought. (Helps that M. lived in the farmhouse with 14 Jamaican guys last year--too complicated of a story to tell here, plus it's not my story to tell...)
Finally, back in Sandwich, we decide to go to eat. By this time it is 9 and we are starving, so we pick up our other artist friend who is staying at TH's and go off to a restaurant.
Our food takes so long that we get it free. By this time, our stomachs have digested themselves, but hey, a free meal is worth it, I guess.
Then there were the car woes: M's car had a problem that started on Saturday night. "What's that noise?" we said, and pulled into a parking place, where a guy was standing with his family. We pop the hood and he wanders over, introduces himself and says he works at a Honda dealership and diagnoses the problem. Turns out he was only half right--something was seized but not the air conditioner, as he thought. He said it was ok to drive as long as we didn't run the a.c., so we continued to drive it for the whole weekend, and on Sunday after a lot of bucking and backfiring, we broke down in front of the house of somebody who used to be a used car salesman. He got it started again, but he diagnosed it incorrectly as bad gas. There is a further episode where we stop in the parking lot of a closed art gallery with a few cars in the lot, and after we've been there for about 20 minutes doing random under-the-hood stuff, one of the other cars' car alarm goes off for several minutes, then stops as mysteriously as it started. We kept just laughing over the surreal nature of each circumstance. Eventually, the final breakdown came on the way home, near Fitchburg, at about 10:45. M called AAA and at 1 am, Jose showed up in the tow truck to take us home. We got home at 4 in the morning. The car turned out to have a seized distributor, which explained ALL the problems we were having, the noise and the poor performance. M drove it home that night, and it ran better than it had the whole time she's had it.
This is the extremely short version of the weirdness.
The show was fine; worth doing again if we actually get in next year. Being on the beach on Monday was quite intense, as previously mentioned. Overall the feeling of the weekend for me was like being aware of the turning of the Earth under one's feet, or being in the exact place between where the sea and the sky meet, with a bright sun shining. I wish I could write it in a way that would make sense, but it was kind of mystical and thus defies logic and words. "WOW" would be a good word, though.
I was home for about 24 hours in the middle of the week, then M and I packed up to go to the Cape for the craft fair that I wasn't supposed to be in. We didn't pull into TH's camp until after midnight on Thursday, and had to get up at 6:30 to get set up in Chatham.
Then the fun began. Sort of literally.
On Friday night, we missed a crucial turn when attempting to leave Chatham, and ended up going south on Rte 28. No problem, thought we, we'll just pick up the highway a little farther west than we meant to. Except it didn't exactly work that way...apparently that section of Rte 28 goes DUE NORTH even though the sign says South. So we ended up in Orleans, even farther from home, trying to get directions from a great Jamaican guy at the Cumberland Farms who kept inviting us to stay with "our friend in Orleans next time." Ooooo, which friend is that, buddy? It was very amusing, we thought. (Helps that M. lived in the farmhouse with 14 Jamaican guys last year--too complicated of a story to tell here, plus it's not my story to tell...)
Finally, back in Sandwich, we decide to go to eat. By this time it is 9 and we are starving, so we pick up our other artist friend who is staying at TH's and go off to a restaurant.
Our food takes so long that we get it free. By this time, our stomachs have digested themselves, but hey, a free meal is worth it, I guess.
Then there were the car woes: M's car had a problem that started on Saturday night. "What's that noise?" we said, and pulled into a parking place, where a guy was standing with his family. We pop the hood and he wanders over, introduces himself and says he works at a Honda dealership and diagnoses the problem. Turns out he was only half right--something was seized but not the air conditioner, as he thought. He said it was ok to drive as long as we didn't run the a.c., so we continued to drive it for the whole weekend, and on Sunday after a lot of bucking and backfiring, we broke down in front of the house of somebody who used to be a used car salesman. He got it started again, but he diagnosed it incorrectly as bad gas. There is a further episode where we stop in the parking lot of a closed art gallery with a few cars in the lot, and after we've been there for about 20 minutes doing random under-the-hood stuff, one of the other cars' car alarm goes off for several minutes, then stops as mysteriously as it started. We kept just laughing over the surreal nature of each circumstance. Eventually, the final breakdown came on the way home, near Fitchburg, at about 10:45. M called AAA and at 1 am, Jose showed up in the tow truck to take us home. We got home at 4 in the morning. The car turned out to have a seized distributor, which explained ALL the problems we were having, the noise and the poor performance. M drove it home that night, and it ran better than it had the whole time she's had it.
This is the extremely short version of the weirdness.
The show was fine; worth doing again if we actually get in next year. Being on the beach on Monday was quite intense, as previously mentioned. Overall the feeling of the weekend for me was like being aware of the turning of the Earth under one's feet, or being in the exact place between where the sea and the sky meet, with a bright sun shining. I wish I could write it in a way that would make sense, but it was kind of mystical and thus defies logic and words. "WOW" would be a good word, though.