Day 6 - New York City (Brought to you by Pace Salsa - "New York City?")

Ok, so to do this day justice, we must continue last night's story. We arrived at Codorus State Park at 12:06 AM on Wednesday, July 23rd. On the entire drive, we had been seeing lightning, but Jason looked up radar on the phone and it said that the storms would be missing us to the south. Once again, how wrong it was. We set up the tent in the dark as usual, still not knowing how to fix the semi-collapsing problem that had occurred in South Carolina, which we now know how to fix since I asked my Dad. The tent once again was semi-collapsed in on us, but we all fell asleep easily. Flash forward to 4:45 AM. BOOOOOOM!!! Good morning, extremely large thunderstorm! The rain just starts pouring down in sheets on us, and the wind blew hard enough to slightly shift the rain cover, allowing a few of our dirty clothes to get wet. Now imagine the four of us in our boxers wondering what on earth to do. Fortunately, the rain gave us a break and stopped for about 15 minutes, just enough to throw everything in the tent into the back of the car and to carry the tent to the bathroom to fold it up in dryness. Again, imagine the four of us running around a campsite at 4:30 AM in just our boxers, carrying air mattresses and tents. Finally we got everything dried and folded up in the bathroom, but at this point we all smelled like wet forest mud. We took turns in the two showers and got all cleaned up and dressed for the day and left the campsite around 5:10 AM. I was driving, Jason was riding shotgun and keeping me company and Gray and Kyle collapsed back to sleep in the back. The trip to Jersey City, NJ was pretty problem free except for when we decided we wanted McGriddles in Pennsylvania. Using Jason's GPS, we ended up trying 6 different McDonalds and not succeeding at a single one. The first two were doing renovations and therefore weren't open, one was the stupid GPS's fault, as it was not a McDonalds but rather a billboard advertising McDonalds, one didn't open until 45 minutes later, and one was inside a mall, so obviously it wasn't open that early. Finally, we gave up, dug up the pop-tarts, and continued towards New Jersey. Not much happened the rest of the drive, except it was obvious when we got to New Jersey because suddenly all the turn signals stopped working and people were just forced to try to swerve in and out of traffic without signalling! How unfortunate! Anyway, we arrived at our campsite at around 9 AM and slept in the car for an hour. It was fun. When we woke up, we took the ferry to Pier 11 on Wall Street. We took Wall Street down to Trinity Church and jumped on the subway on over to Yankee Stadium. We got there and made our way down to the line for the bleacher seats. After standing outside for 15 minutes, we started filtering our way into the stadium, only to find that no bags are allowed into the stadium unless they're purses or diaper bags. Mainly because the security there is too lazy to check the bags for anything. Therefore, even though Kyle's fanny pack only had a towel, 3 baseballs, and a bottle of water, and my bag only had my laptop and a bottle of water, we were forced to go across the street and check in our bags at the bowling alley. Stupid. Anyway, we finally got into the stadium just in time for the last 8 minutes of batting practice. I'll start by saying that the stadium was a disappointment somewhat, due to A) how crappy it was and B) how crappy the human environment was. The park was nothing special except for Monument Park, which we found out that we weren't allowed to visit because the bleacher seats are separated from the rest of the stadium. The fact that we could only see stuff in the bleacher area was a bummer in the first place, but then the fact that we had an hour and a half to kill, the fact that we were all tired, and the fact that there was nowhere comfortable to sit or lie down made it even more boring. I did manage to find a way to get a few pictures inside Monument Park. About 45 minutes before game time, I made my way over to a part of the bleachers that was right about the monuments. The line to go through the monument had been cut off at that point, so only a few people were left filtering inside. I found the first person I could that didn't already have a camera with him, asked him to take some pictures for me, and then tossed my camera down to him. At this point, the security guard was starting to slowly push people out of the monument, so the guy took pictures of just a couple of important Yankees and then tossed the camera back. It was pretty nice.



Finally the game started at 1:05 PM. I would tell you what all happened but I was too tired to remember most of it, plus the "well-run" vending companies at Yankee Stadium didn't have any scorecards. Way to go Yankees, reflecting the Steinbrenner values of being dumb. Now I will say that there was one cool thing about the bleacher seats: Roll Call. Every game, one of the "Bleacher Creatures" starts the bleacher crowd in chants for each Yankee fielder, starting with center field. The crowd continues chanting until the player turns around and acknowledges the crowd. That was pretty cool. The game itself was pretty boring, with the Yankees just scoring in two innings and the Twins just scoring one run in the ninth inning, which allowed Mariano Rivera to come in and save the game for the Yankees. The final score was 5 to 1, and while the game wasn't amazing, it is still an awesome experience that none of us will ever forget.

After the game, we picked up our Souvenir of the Game, listed in Kyle's blog (eastcoastbaseballroadtrip.blogspot.com), across the street from the stadium and made our way back onto the Subway into town. We got off at Grand Central Station, grabbed some coffee, and then headed out onto Broadway. We didn't get too far before realizing that we were starving. We stooped at Chipotle because A) their burritos dominate and B) they had free Wi-Fi (side note: Wi-Fi has been way harder to find than one would expect, which is why blogs have been so infrequently posted). After eating, posting, and checking facebook (after all, facebook is life), we took off down Broadway towards Times Square. We took in our fill of Broadway, stopping in the gigantic Toys-R-Us store to see the Ferris Wheel inside it, checking out Times Square and seeing where most of the shows on Broadway were. Then we headed over to Central Park to look, since three of us had never seen it. From there, we went to the semi-invisible Apple store, which just has a glass entrance but the store itself is underground. After that, we climbed back on the subway to get out to our ferry near Wall Street. We took one that took us pretty close to Wall Street but didn't quite take us there. That turned out being a problem, as we got a little mixed up before finding our way back to Pier 11. When we got back to Pier 11, it was 8:41 PM. Our boat had left at 8:40, and the next one didn't come until 9:40. We sat around the dock, called some people, tossed a racquetball around that i had left in my computer bag. When we finally got on the boat at 9:30, we had started to see a few flashes of lightning. When we got back to the camp, we trucked it over to our site and started setting up the tent correctly thanks to the directions I got from my dad. Unfortunately, what we thought was a stake bag in the tent bag was actually a bag of extra poles. At this point, things are starting to seem a lot like the night before. About halfway through putting up the tent, we see the sheets of rain advancing on us rapidly. Too bad it was too late to act this time. The rain hit us before we could even start to throw stuff in the car. Jason was inside the tent when it hit, Kyle was close enough to the car to jump in and stay relatively dry, but Gray and I got absolutely drenched. Gray and I ran to the bathroom to discard phones, wallets, etc. Then ran back out to the tent to start grabbing the two air mattresses which were already pretty moist due to the tent not being fully erected. We also grabbed Gray's sleeping bag, which was in its protective bag, so it barely got wet. Finally, when there was a semi-break in the rain, Jason ran to the car and Gray and I carried the tent into the bathroom. Then it started raining really, really hard again. We called Jason and told him and Kyle to go to the nearest Walmart and get tent stakes and towels. While the were off doing that, Gray and I hung the tent, the tarp, and the rain cover for the tent over the shower stalls in the bathroom. We slapped the tarp until it was dry since it doesn't hold water. Then we put deflated the mattresses and put them under the hand dryer in the bathroom inch by inch until they were both semi-dry, then we dried off our hats and then sat around in the bathroom waiting for Jason and Kyle to back and for the rain to stop pouring down. Finally the rain stopped, and Jason's radar said that the storm's had passed and shouldn't be bothering us again.We set up the tent again in the dark with stakes and Jason and I climbed in. Kyle and Gray sacrificed comfort for being smart and slept in the car. The story picks up tomorrow in Day 7. Goodnight Josh, Jason, Kyle, and Gray, ye unsuspecting campers.


This was actually the only Starbucks we saw in the entire city in 2+ hours of walking. Surprising.