I think I promised my loyal readership a weekend recap, and far be it from me to start lying to the five or six readers I have. So here for your reading enjoyment is the adventures of Andrew, Kat and Cami in the City of New York! (Warning: It’s friggin’ long!)

I guess I’ll pick this story up from the end of work on Friday. Kat met me to go grab a few slices down at Two Boots and walk around the East Village. It was as much a new experience for me as it was for her — I’m still learning much about this great city. We came across a lot that had been turned into a public garden with a three story junk sculpture that you had no choice but to stare at.

We cabbed it back to the hotel room to collect Cami and head out for that evenings festivities at a rave out in Jamacia, Queens (One Love, baby!) inside the Amazara Ballroom. The trip out there was about as exciting as a forty minute subway ride can be, but the activity inside the place more than made up for it all. That was about the most jam-packed I had ever seen a dance floor in my life. A few hours grooving and moving, and it was time to head back to the hotel.

Now Cami wasn’t feeling all that hot and she had an audition to go to a few hours later (the whole reason Cami and Kat had make the trip up from North Carolina), but Kat and I were nowhere near our bedtimes, so we left Cami to sleep in the hotel room and took a six hour walk around a midtown Midtown Manhattan that I had never seen before.

Yes, there were still people about and shops open, but the volume of them was much more scarce. It almost felt like we were taking ownership of it all; just touring our new acquisition and snapping pictures all the while. We stumbled around Times Square, passed the public library, over in front of the Intrepid, down through Rockefeller Center and wound up sitting on a large rock in Central Park, basking in the warmth of the newly risen sun.

A quick nap later, my Saturday officially began with my first trip on the LIRR out to Long Island so Kat could visit her friend Harris — Long Beach if you want to get specific about our destination. It was just like home with the beach, the jetties, the boardwalk and so on. The only major difference I saw was the town’s architectural preference to Spanish tile roofs. I guess if you’ve seen one northeastern beach town, you’ve seen them all. ^_^

A slightly longer nap later, we all headed out to take in the wonder that is the illuminated city from the top of the Empire State Building. Those of you who live in the city and have never gone to visit this marvelous building; shame on you. Those of you who have never ventured to the top at night, well double-shame on you. In my not so humble opinion, there is no better time to go.

The real fun began that night down at the Mercury Lounge (one more NYC venue off the list) where we had the pleasure of seeing Corn Mo, a man with the apparent combination of "Weird" Al Yankovick, Sam Kinnison and Bobcat Goldthwait in him belt out tunes on his accoridian and get the whole crowd warmed up for future rock gods Rana. Remember the name and where you first heard it! I had the pleasure of seeing Rana a while back at the Wetlands, and the boys have been practicing something fierce. They had the whole room jumping and shouting and singing and…well, you get the idea.

After the show, we headed out to Cafe Creole for the mandatory drinking that just needed to be done. I actually managed to behave myself, but that was probably because I got sunburn from the beach trip earlier in the day and was a tad bit dehydrated. You know, when you feel like all the water in your body has been replaced by sand? That’s about how I felt.

It was probably for the best though, because my two partners in crime for the weekend were more than making up for it with their consumption. I won’t go into too many details here just because it’ll be on internet permanent record, but we’ll just say it was a rather interesting ordeal getting Cami back to the hotel room that night. ^_^

The trip back home on Sunday was just as eventful as the one into the city on Friday, which is to say not that eventful. I did manage to get my weekends workout in lifting luggage into the overhead rack on the train, but that was about it.

Bottom line, I had a great time and look forward to doing it again sometime soon. Even though the weekend wasn’t everything I had hoped it would be (for purely selfish reasons — why the fuck am I cursed with "nice guy" syndrome?), it was most certainly an experience I will be hard pressed to forget.

Tags: Personal

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 14th, 2002 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.