The house rose slowly and our plans for an early visit to Philly withered. Suzie broke off to attend to some business and the rest of us took a walk around the Art Museum before reuniting. In the interim, Brad and I had talked about driving the van.

Me: How’d you like driving the van?
Brad: It was much easier than I thought it would be.
Me: Yeah, she can dance.
Brad: Slow but graceful.

We searched for a place for dinner and after a few misses dropped off those that had to return directly to Cinci so they could make their connection in New York City. Paul, Suzie, Daniel, and I found Chipotle as the only open restaurant on Memorial Day Monday and ruminated on the week before dropping Suzie off.

Paul, Daniel, and I returned to my house and Paul lingered a bit before departing leaving just Daniel and myself. We returned the van and met up with some friends to chat for the evening.

In addition to Cody, Ty, Suzie, Brad, and Michael were going to stay over and they had bussed out to New York from Cincinnati. I had borrowed a 12 passenger van for the day to carry everyone and I expected to meet them somewhat refreshed from sleeping on a long bus drive. Everyone was a bit of a wreck as no one slept well on the bus. The group expanded to nine as we picked up Paul and Janine who were NYC locals. In no way did we look out of place.

From 2012-05-25 NYC

Our first stop was a walk south to the Brooklyn bridge where Michael retrieved a rubber ducky that had washed ashore. From there, we went up Wall Street and saw Trinity Church and the rising Freedom Tower which kind of just disappeared into the fog of the day.

For lunch we subwayed to the Chelsea Chipotle which sometimes makes burritos out of chorizo and Italian spiced meats but sadly they had no such offerings now. Ty purchased a second burrito which he carried around with him for the rest of the day and we make various other stops before kind of dropping from exhaustion including Rockefeller Center, World of Lego, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Time Square.

Janine decided to come home with us and Paul departed. Once piled into the van, there was a brief 10 minute period of stop and go traffic before everyone in the van except me was asleep. Traffic was horrible and it took us over 80 minutes just to leave New York. During this time I was in communication with Daniel who through a lucky sequence of delays on his part was at the Septa station within 10 seconds of us arriving.

The party was assembled, so we had a party. The total distance covered by my guests was about 6000 miles and that deserved pizza and wings.