New York City!

Sorry I've been getting behind. Here's a link to photos of my trip to NYC:
http://uwrf.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034022&l=51217&id=184904887

This week's column, a trip recap:

Since I got back from New York late Sunday night, everyone’s had the same question for me: “How was your trip?”
I got tired of answering after the eight or ninth person and told them to read my column this week instead. It saves me from having to tell the story over and over again.

Last week Tuesday night I headed west toward the Twin Cities. While driving, I began thinking about everything I had forgotten. When I reached Hudson to do my shopping, I called each of my fellow travelers. Turns out I wasn’t the only forgetful one. After arriving at Cindy’s, we reviewed our plans over an episode of Miami Ink. Cindy shared with us she wanted to get a tattoo. Meanwhile her husband Larry had a strange look on his face I took as disapproval. More on that later. I told Cindy to go ahead if she wanted, but get something small that can easily be covered.

I don’t think any of us slept more than two or three hours because 4:30 a.m. came awful fast Wednesday morning. After a quick stop for gas station coffee, we were on our way. As we pulled up at our drop-off point, Cindy suddenly realized she’d left one of her suitcases at home. Thankfully, it was an extra bag with just a towel, toiletries and a pair of pants. Nothing irreplaceable. Still, we figured that would be our disaster of the day.

The flight to Newark airport was rather routine. I planned to take a nap, but instead spent the time gabbing to Jen about newspaper stuff. She’s also a reporter at a weekly in the Twin Cities. We arrived, found our bags and boarded the train to the Big Apple. After getting a little disoriented, we finally found our place of residence for the next few days, the Big Apple Hostel. For those of you unfamiliar with hostels, it’s a very scaled down hotel. They’re more popular in Europe. They have bunk beds and shared bathrooms. Although this hostel accepts all ages, it’s most popular among the 30 and under crowd.
We wandered Times Square a bit (1/2 block from the hostel), then grabbed an awesome slice of New York pizza and visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The rest of Wednesday afternoon was dedicated to getting seats at Conan O’Brien. We went and checked with a clerk in the gift shop on where to check in. He said it’s upstairs, but don’t bother checking in until the time on the ticket. We walked up anyway, and they were handing out wristbands to confirm seats. “Come back about 4:10,” she said. So we headed back out, watched the skaters in Rockefeller Plaza and shopped. We came back at 4:05 p.m. “Come back in 10 minutes,” he said. So we got something to drink and came back. As we started to walk up, a lady stopped us. “You have to go down there,” she said. So we went that direction. The next guy said, “You’re too late, you were supposed to be upstairs.”

I could have slapped him. We explained to him what we were told, and he took us up to the correct line. So after all that chasing around, we did get into see Conan. Although I must say none of the NBC interns seemed to know what was really going on. To be continued next week...