The Big Apple Part I

It had almost been a full year since we'd had our first #meadadventures, and we were more than ready to go on another. It was approaching my sister's (biologically speaking, she's really my cousin but she has never been that way to my brother and I) spring break and since the rest of us grandkids are "adults", we decided to live vicariously through her. We picked the place, bought the tickets, and found a place to stay...in March, we were on our way to New York City. Due to a cheaper price in tickets we decided to fly out of Atlanta and rent a car for the trip instead of having to worry about parking our car at the airport (a decision that turned out to be a poor choice, but that doesn't come until the end).

#meadadventures tip: Sometimes it may be a better deal to fly out of another city's airport, but most of the time it is better to just pay a little more upfront to fly out of your hometown. We always write down the plane ticket price, parking lot fees for parking a car for a week (or price of a rental), and any added baggage fees. Only once have we benefited from flying out of another city.

When the day to leave arrived, we loaded our rental car and off we were to Atlanta. We arrived in the city a little early...actually, really early but we didn't want to miss our flight. We stopped at ikea to waste some time and for Andrew, my brother, to find a backpack for his carry-on (we ended up referring to his backpack as "pack pack" and I will do so as this post goes on). Once pack pack was purchased, we decided to head to the airport to ditch the rental and go through security. Having quite a large amount of time to waste, we ate dinner at a restaurant close to our gate and then waited to board. While we waited we thought it might be a good idea to figure out how we were actually going to get from the airport to our hotel in Times Square. The Meads never shy away from public transportation so we suggested taking the bus to the nearest subway station, taking the subway as close to our hotel as possible, and then walking the rest of the way. It seemed like a solid plan to everyone at the time. Let's start with you knowing that the Meads have never been to NYC, and it was going to be around 11 p.m. as we were landing. So now we can fast forward to the airport in New York. We were so excited (this was the first trip we had all taken together without the rest of the family), but very tired from all the travel and just wanted to be at our hotel (code for: we were all breaking down mentally and it was a coin toss for who would snap first). As we had planned, we gathered our luggage, bought our metro passes, and boarded a bus to the subway. Like I said before, the Meads had never been to NYC so when we got off of the bus and didn't see the correct subway entrance, we were lost. Here we were, five "kids" from the south walking around at midnight with luggage in tow not knowing where in the heck we were going. We finally got to the right subway entrance and then here we go...3, 2, 1...our first snap. Tommy goes through the turn-style first, then myself, and my sister is supposed to be next...only she isn't. I turn around to see her suitcase handle locked in the arm of the turn-style, my brother frantically trying to get it to release, and Tommy (oblivious to it all) was gone. In writing this, I am in tears laughing so hard at the scene that replays in my head, but in the moment this was far from a laughing matter. We wrestled the suitcase loose and while waiting for the subway the only thing making a sound were the rats crawling on the tracks. Once we arrived in the general vicinity of our hotel it was near one in the morning, and we still had some more walking to do. When we finally reached our hotel we all had the vision of us being handed our glorious room card and going to sleep off all of what had just happened. Only, it didn't happen like that. No, our night got a little worse when we were told that our room actually didn't exist. Thankfully, my cousin (she got us the room through the company she works for) was actually awake at the time we were calling her and totally saved the day. FINALLY something was going our way! We were instead given two rooms and off we were to get some much needed sleep...and some space to cool down. So far the score was NYC-1, Grandkids-0.