over fall break i had the opportunity to go to new york city with my friend shelley. this was a fantastic way to round out the last few months in the Year of Kate! i've been wanting to visit new york city since i was a kid. i had lofty goals of going to NYU when i was looking at college materials my junior year. (my plan was to major in everything so i'd probably still be finishing my bachelor's degree had i actually applied or been accepted.) now...many years later, i finally got to see the Big Apple and it was nothing sort of a fantastic trip.
shelley and i devised this plan a while ago based on our mutual love of the show sex in the city. sometime during the summer, an insanely cheap ticket popped up from MLI to JFK and finally our NYC weekend came to fruition. shells lives in philly and we haven't hung out since my ABQ days so we were WAY overdue for some girl time. it was great getting to share my first NYC experience with her!!
the beginning of the trip started out with a bit of drama. on wednesday after classes and meetings, i was scurrying around my apartment trying to get everything packed and organized. i rented a movie from iTunes so i could watch it on my phone and in the process of trying to get it transferred over, iTunes asked me if i wanted to update my software. i hesitated for a minute, wondering what the correct answer to that pop-up box was, and then clicked "yes" thinking this would not be a big deal. that turned out to be a HUGE mistake. not being a computer expert, i can't explain what happened next. i will tell you that my windows software also decided to update at the same time and somehow in the process of all of these updates, my iPhone exploded. not literally, but indeed something was very wrong with it. in my attempts to fix the situation, i'm sure i made it worse and before i knew it, the only option was for me to restore my phone. i gave it a shot and that didn't work either. i would get an error message and it wouldn't let me restore it. thus the catch-22 begins. i decided to reboot the laptop, since this is sometimes a useful solution. because of the windows update, that process took a very long time. it literally said it had to update 17 different things. 17. so while it was taking it's sweet-ass time doing that, i washed some dishes, made sure everything was packed, took my luggage to the car, took the garbage out, and when all that was finished it installing update 14 of 17. keep in mind that my plan was to meet my friend jeremy in the quad cities for dinner and then he was graciously going to let me stay at his place so i could catch my flight at 6:15 the next day from moline. so all of this phone drama is putting me behind schedule. after the computer finally rebooted, i tried to restore my phone again and it didn't work. again. this is the point where i start to panic a bit, because i figured that i would need my phone on this trip. this...my first trip ever to NYC. the trip that is giving me a little anxiety about traveling on subways by myself with luggage. plus, like most of you, i don't have people's numbers memorized anymore. so i might need shelley's number at some point. as well as my friend jared's, who we stayed with on the first night. and probably jeremy's since he was likely wondering what the hell was going on. i emailed jeremy to let him know the deal and that i would be in touch when i had a working phone. i grabbed my old motorola and managed to locate it's charger (which was a miracle.) then i hauled to davenport, making it to the at&t store two minutes before they were closing for the night. yes...i'm sure they hated me. but i think i won them over with my desperation. fortunately they were able to get my iPhone restored and because i had the good sense to bring my old phone, some of my contacts were also retrieved. i was so happy that i hugged the nerdy guy who works there which probably made him very uncomfortable. seriously, i can't express the relief i felt when the phone was operational again! i grabbed some food and then headed over to jeremy's about 4 hours after i planned to be there.
fortunately, that was where my travel woes ended. the flights to NYC were good, though a little delayed. the subway ride was uneventful and pretty easy to navigate. and before i knew it, i was in manhattan, giving shelley and jared hugs, making a schedge for the evening, drinking a beer that tasted like watermelon (and then another called Pork Slap...it didn't taste like pork), eating yummy pizza, meeting new people, exclaiming often "I'M IN NEW YORK!," eating gravy fries at the Seinfeld diner, and generally just having a GREAT time. there is a lot more to write about, but since this post is already on the long side, i'll write more later.
WE'RE IN NEW YORK!!!!
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