The Trip: Part Four, DC and NY

[craigoxbrow]

The flight was unduly long, going through the hub of Charlotte, North Carolina and ending up in Baltimore and sod-it-get-a-cab, arriving at the scruffy but adequate hotel fairly late, and then... sightseeing.

Me at the White House, as taken by a nice fellow tourist

I'll spare you most of the three hundred photos I took at the Smithsonian buildings and the national gallery, but C3P0 is in the lobby at one of the Smithsonian buildings, the central atrium gives a sense of scale for the gallery, and this is me reflected in a space helmet and the air and space centre. Yes, I should have stepped back a bit so you could tell.

Me At The Lincoln Memorial as taken by another nice tourist who I'd taken a photo of on his camera.

Three days and a really tiny pizza for five dollars at the airport later, up to Buffalo NY to see Varyar, and behold Niagara. Then down to NYC for four days...

... after a three-and-a-half-hour delay at Buffalo airport due to storms...

... to discover that the $1400 put into my card three days earlier hadn't come through yet.

At the hotel. At 1 a.m.

The guy at the front desk was nice enough to phone his manager when I found that my online booking was only actually an online pre-booking unlike every other online booking I'd made for the last five weeks, and let me phone Paul to cover the money, but this still left me stuck in a closet-sized hotel room for three days with no money before it came through on the day I was due to find out.

So I did my initial sightseeing on foot and mostly around nearby Central Park and walking twenty blocks to Times Square.

And the night before I was due to fly, I was interupted at 7pm and woken at midnight by the fire alarm in the hotel going off twice, as set off by someone burning something in a microwave and then having a smoke because he'd liked the attention.

But it did finally come through, so I did a sightseeing bus trip...

in this sort of weather.

Admittedly it cleared up a bit later.

I could now afford to go to NY's not-free-like-the-Smithsonian natural history museum. I'll spare you the pictures from the lots of exhibitions about tribal people, which seems to be stretching the remit, but never mind.

At this point, I was well glad to get to the airport (sixty dollar hour-long cab ride) and fly away.

Home

So, yes, lessons learned... pack a lunch if you're going to a foreign city where you don't know anyone, try and go broke in the city with lots of free museums and a British embassy rather than lots of $20-at-the-door museums, expect hotel quality to vary not by price but by location as I was in a fantastic hotel then an okay hotel and then a hole for about $150 a night each, have phone numbers handy in case of emergency, buy a robust suitcase rather than a cheap one, spare a day or two before a major event in a new timezone for jetlag and/or food poisoning, and don't trust credit cards at all.