Wednesday, November 15, 2006

A Long Wednesday Delayed

I write this post from the airport. Today I awoke and got all my things together and packed my bags. I left my apartment with two hours to get to the airport. Usually this is enough time to get to JFK, even with traffic. Do you sense the impending doom? So I was walking down the street to quickly return the "Notorious Bettie Page" Dvd I forgot to return the day before and I notice an extreme lack of cabs. Maybe this is just in my mind I tell myself. Two hours is fine! That's plenty of time! So I get out of Kim's and walk up st marks towards 3rd avenue looking for a cab. Nothing. Ok I'll try 3rd there are always cabs on 3rd avenue. Taken. Ok how about 4th avenue. I roll my wheely luggage up the gravel road bouncing plastic chunks off the wheels. 15 minutes in. All the cabs are taken. 20 minutes. Finally a cab stops next to me and asks where I'm going. "JFK" and I move to get into the cab. The driver turns back to his wheel and drives off before I can even lift my luggage off the sidewalk. Seriously. He just left me there because he didn't want to drive to the airport. That is illegal by the way. So I walk around a little more and begin to get really nervous. I still have plenty of time but it's just the nerves starting to get to me. Finally a cab drives up that is off duty but the guy is nice enough to take me to JFK. It's probably close to where he is dropping off his cab for the night. The cab driver says "I'll take you to JFK but I have to warn you, there is alot of traffic right now." Shit. Well even with lots of traffic it shouldn't take more than an hour. Right? So we are off and the cab driver is great, he's swerving around cars and honking and getting the finger thrown at him more times than Donald Rumsfeld at a peace rally. Everything is going great until we hit the expressway. And that's where things begin to go wrong. And I mean really wrong. It was probably the smoke pouring from the hood of the cab. I really hoped it was a magical illusion and this cab driver was an amature magician. I was hoping that at any moment he would turn around and yell "I'm just kidding!" But unfortunately he did not. And you can't imagine how hard it is to find a free cab on an expressway. SO needless to say it's now 6:47 and my flight left at 445 now i'm delayed and waiting for the new flight. It's going to be a long wednesday.

No comments: