SD->NYC->LV

Not working a regular job has afforded me more time to travel around. I'm not sure if I have spent more than two weekends at home since late November. In early Jan, I flew out to New York to check on Kent and Seth. My travel karma seems to be pretty good, as I managed to land just as the snow started to fall on their 3rd giant storm of the winter... and managed to take off 5 days later about an hour before their 4th one hit. :)

My ticket was into MacArthur Airport in Islip, so I rented a car and stopped off in Long Island to see Dianna and Graig before eventually making it into Brooklyn. Kent was having some landlord issues and needed to get his stuff out of his apartment in Hoboken. Since I had a car, we headed over there to grab his stuff and get a slice of pizza at one of the many awesome places in town. They say its the water over there that makes the dough so good. Makes sense to me, the tap water in New York is some of the best I've tasted anywhere. After filling up the trunk with his personal affects, we took a driving tour of lower Manhattan. It was sort of trippy to look around and be the only car that wasn't a yellow taxi.

Because of Kent's untimely housing issues, we were bunking with Seth and Ollie in Brooklyn for the night. The next morning, Kent, Seth and I took the subway into the city and spent all day on a walking tour. It was really cold, but we still managed to see a lot of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. We grabbed dinner in Koreatown, and then met up with Brian, an old high school and college buddy of mine, at a bar near the Empire State Building. I drank about twice as much as I should have and managed to convince Brian and Kent to go to Atlantic City the next morning. Later that evening I found myself on the upper east side in a bar full of Jets fans. I'm not really sure I remember how I got there. But there I was. Somehow I made it back to Brooklyn in the early morning hours, but not without a raging headache. Doh! I still drink like I have a 20 year-old liver.

I woke up to Seth handing me two slices of peanut-butter wheat toast, and a giant bottle of water. I ate the toast along with 2 Excedrin Migraine caplets. 30 minutes and a hot shower later, I was feeling as good as new. True to my word, I gathered up Kent and Brian and we hit the New Jersey Turnpike bound for Atlantic Shitty.

We stayed at the Borgata, which is not on the main boardwalk. That is just as well seeing as how the Boardwalk is a sewer. The hotel was very nice. Half of the point of the trip was to give Seth and Ollie their space for the weekend, and also for us to sleepo in some nice comfy beds. We mostly gambled while there. I started off down but managed to make a score before the end of the trip. I got a knock on the hotel room door from Security... informing me that my friend Brian was being taken to the hospital for food poisoning. Holy hell! They wheeled him out on a stretcher. His wife came down from the city to pick him up. I guess he has a sensitive GI tract because I had the same pizza that he did and I felt fine. He was ok a few days later, but wow.

We headed back toward the city in the morning. I dropped off Kent and said my goodbyes to him and Seth before heading back out to Long Island to drop off the car and catch the last flight home before the next giant snow storm hit. I had a great time, but as always, its a joy to come home to San Diego.