Gotham City: Part I


We arrived at JFK on time or a little early. I had made prepaid reservations with the SuperShuttle to take us to our hotel in Queens. I called them from the special phone near the C4 baggage carrousel. The guy that answered said give me about 30 minutes. After more than 30 minutes I called back and he said the driver was at T4 and it would be about 10 minutes. Later, I concluded that T6 is where we were waiting. Anyway, the driver showed up. He said, "You're going to La Quinta in Manhattan, right?" I answered, "No, Queens." The driver muttered with exasperation, "Oh my God!" He asked if I knew the address, and I gave him the print-out of our confirmation. He called his dispatcher to get directions.

We stopped at some of the other terminals and picked up more passengers. Some of them were a family from Germany. I talked to the mom a little bit. Her English and my German were about equal (meaning pretty bad), but I explained we were visiting my daughter.

We drove for a long time and then I realized we had arrived in the general vicinity of the hotel. I called my daughter who had come over to the hotel to meet us. She was already there, and said, "Oh yeah, you're just around the corner." The driver didn't know that of course, and he turned the wrong way. It turns out we went about 40 blocks in the wrong direction before he called his dispatcher. He turned around and headed in the right, went past the hotel, and had to turn around to come back. Okay, it took about twice the amount of time it should have.

By this time we were starving, so the three of us went to eat at Vicky Punjabi Haandi and had tandoori chicken. Later we rode the subway over to Manhattan, walked around Union Square, and saw Kirsten's apartment. Later, we rode the N to Queensborough Plaza and switched to the 7 to get to our stop at 40th and Queens Blvd.