The Great American Road Trip: Day 81

I didn't track this particular journey with my phone because I was using the GPS as a secondary one to supplement the Garmin - it's perfect for longer trips but in cities it is just hopelessly confused, so relying on the phone is a better idea when the cell signal is more reliable than the GPS waves pinging around the skyscrapers. If I had tracked it, it would have been a line from Brooklyn to Montclair, NJ - a 25 mile trip that took a good 2 1/2 hours, hence the title of the post for today.

Friday I went out in the morning to deal with parking, but then walked back to Emily's apartment and got some really solid work done on my grad school applications for a few hours. Once I was satisfied with my progress I took the subway to Manhattan and started my day at the museum at FIT - the Fashion Institute of Technology. They had a free exhibit called "A Queer History of Fashion - From the Closet to the Catwalk" - and after looking at the prices of most of the museums around the city, free sounded perfect. They tragically wouldn't allow photos, but it was fascinating! (They published a whole book with photos and essays about each piece and how it fit into or diverged from the general clothing trends of the time) I'm not the most fashion conscious, but I did find it really interesting to see a progression of clothing from the 1800s up thorough today, including a lot of outfits worn by movie stars and designed by famous designers. I think it only runs through January, if you're in the area it's worth a look.

The little museum exhibit took up just the right amount of time, I was right on time to hop on the subway outside the museum and go uptown to meet my friend Janine for coffee. Janine and I went to high school together, and then she ended up finishing her degree at Wellsley, another of those crazy women's colleges. We had lost touch for the most part, and were actually brought back in contact at one point by our respective college friends who happened to be childhood best friends! Small world. Janine was running a few minutes late so I sat down next to the opera house with my stack of postcards. I swear there is no better way to make friends than to start writing postcards in public, it just invites people to comment. I know I could have brushed off the intrusion, but I'm trying to make it a policy to stop and talk to people who seem curious and want to just chat. I capped my pen after half a sentence and started talking to the real estate investor who was sitting next to me, also waiting for someone and just enjoying the slightly warmer weather and watery sunshine peeking through the clouds.

Janine was always known for being a brilliant student, but once people got past her amazing academics they discovered that she's an incredibly thoughtful friend who genuinely wants other people to be just as successful as she is - I can't even count how many people in our class benefited from the generous gift of her time and knowledge as she informally tutored us in just about any subject we might have a question in. She studied neuroscience and French, then got her Masters in Performance at NYU, and now happily bustles between a kaleidoscope of jobs in publishing, tutoring middle and high school students, recording books on tape, doing theater work in several capacities, and generally being amazing (did I get everything?).

We grabbed a cup of coffee to go and started wandering through that part of Central Park aptly named "The Ramble" for its wandering, crisscrossing paths that were perfect for spending a few hours walking and catching up on our respective lives for the past few years. We ended up at the Natural History Museum, but by that point it was pretty late - she had to go to an appointment and I had to go retrieve my car and move to New Jersey.

Janine and I said goodbye and I got back on the subway for the last time, making my way over to Brooklyn. I paid my parking bill, put air in the tires because one was low, returned my Metro card to Emily's house, and then immediately got stuck in the center of a very busy intersection trying to turn left and being honked at from every direction. :p Thus began my driving adventure. I won't give you the block by block playback, although I did spend at least 15 minutes on each block. I have no idea how traffic eventually moves - I swear it looked packed solid, and then without visible reason, a space for one car to squeeze would suddenly appear and someone would swerve into it, always with a chorus of car horns as people anticipated traffic moving and then got stuck in the middle of the intersection, blocking cross traffic often for several light cycles.

Somehow magically things kept crawling along, and I eventually made it safely out to beautiful Montclair to stay with my cousin Jenny, her husband Chris, and their adorable, smiley son Colin (aka Biggie). I got there just in time to say goodnight to Biggie, and then the three of us chatted and enjoyed some pizza before going to bed.