Our main plan for yesterday was to go Geocaching in Central Park. So after another wonderful breakfast (perogies, sausage, fruit smoothies, and peach cake), we made a plan and got on our way. We'd had a big breakfast and left around 11:30, so we figured we'd just get some lunch from a street vendor or something.
We found an old friend!
Oh! Also. When we got on the subway, we found this awesome guy.
The guy in the middle (with the black hat) just wandered onto the subway, looking for a nice place to sit. So he picked that seat, said something to the guy next to him, and started drawing. In less than a minute he'd drawn a portrait of the guy in the blue shirt. It was incredible. But he just kept adding detail to the picture. The guy in the blue shirt missed his stop... but he just laughed it off and sat back down, waiting for the next stop. The end picture was really really good. He gave the artist some money ($20, I think) for the picture, then went about his business. I just thought it was so interesting how it all worked. The artist had an eye for who would be a willing client, and the man in blue was clearly on his way to something, but he was so laid back about it that he was able to take some time to enjoy the little things.
When we got off the subway we made our way to Central Park and began Geocaching. It was sort of a bust. We tried 5 different caches... and didn't find any of them. Hurumph. But we say some parts of Central Park we would not have seen otherwise. One of the caches was supposed to be in the Conservatory, but when it wasn't there we just walked around and looked at things for a while. We ended up walking the entire length of Central Park, which is about 3 miles in a straight line. But since it's a park with many non-vertical paths, it was closer to 4 or 4.5 miles. It was fun.
We went to another pizza place for dinner. This one was much fancier than the others and I think it was my favorite thin crust.
After dinner we went back to Time Square... and that's when things got interesting. Keep in mind that after about 2 or 3 hours of trying to Geocache, my phone was nearly dead. I turned it off in case we really needed it for directions. So we're walking through Time Square and this guys comes up to me and says "Hey. Do you like funny white guys?" So he starts telling us about how Time Square isn't the "real New York" and everything. He then tells us about this comedy club "where the real New Yorkers hang out." After a quick 15 second conference, we decided to give it a shot. We'd been looking for something to do anyways. He gave us some directions and we were on our way.
We arrived at the club about 30 minutes early and just stood outside waiting with 4 other people. Well..... at 8:25 some guy opens the door and informs us that they had to cancel the show for tonight. Sweet. We didn't really need that $20 anyways. Oh well, it was an adventure. We'd picked up a map from the last subway stop, so we figured out how to get back to the ferry. It looked like it was just a few blocks away, so we started to walk.
It turns out that the map was pretty poor at proportions. Usually Kimmy and I are both really good with maps. But when all of the streets are numbers (or the roads aren't on the map) and we aren't sure which direction we're traveling, it's difficult. After taking two wrong turns, walking for about an hour and a half, and walking through some areas that were clearly not where tourists generally travel, we ended up right in the middle of China Town. I've heard it said before that people get lost in China Town. They're silly. We were so lost that we wound up IN China Town. With the last bit of life in my phone we tried to find our way to the nearest subway. And we went the wrong way again. I have no idea how I've been able to make so many wrong turns this trip. Apparently I'm really great at navigating in a car, but for some reason walking is so much more difficult. So we walked towards where we thought the subway was, but ended up just finding this park that seemed way to full of kids for 9:30 at night. And there were about 30 adults playing this card game with the main point (I assume) of being angry and slapping cards on the table.
After a while we saw a vacant taxi and hailed it. I told the driver to take us to South Ferry. I guess that translated into "just wherever you feel like dropping us off." Actually I think he just got his directions mixed up because he took us to East Ferry. Which was not at all where we wanted to go. But we didn't know that until we'd gotten out of the car and walked a bit. We assumed that it was just a different side of the building. But... it was actually the wrong place entirely! So we hailed another cab and I tried "Staten Island Ferry" this time. It worked. He got us to the front entrance of the terminal and we were excited.
From the time when we'd first purchased the tickets until that point (just after 9:30), we'd racked up the following statistics: Time taken - 2 hours; Dollars spent - $43 ($20 for tickets, $5 for subway fare to the club, $5 for ice cream in China Town, $13 for two taxis); Miles walked - 3+; Rage Level - over 9000. But we made it. My goodness...we made it. I was so happy to stumble back into our bed and breakfast last night. We'd had quite the day.
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