Today is international eat white chocolate day.
Whilst the beds are the most comfortable things ever we still wake up at stupid'o'clock in the morning so we have more time to kill than we planned. Today we pick up the car and start our journey north but that's not until lunchtime so we pack the cases (throw stuff in really) and head out towards Grand Central Terminus to see some more sights.
We arrive at rush hour, about 8:30 and the station is immediately familiar as it's been in lots of movies be it the police station from Bladerunner or used by a flash mob on YouTube.
We haven't eaten a ton of food for at least four hours so we went for some breakfast. True to form they didn't have wifi, what is it with this place, people either want £20 for it, don't have it or its so slow it's measured in bits per minute.
Anyway, the breakfast was good so we headed back to Time Square as we hadn't done a walk for a while and thought we'd get a milkshake from McDs and abuse their wifi. Unfortunately McDs refused to sell us a shake as it was too early, fries they can serve, beer, maybe, but no shake; company policy. We abused the wifi anyway, caching the maps for the next leg of the trip and booking the hotel for the night.
We packed and left the hotel and trundled our cases around ten blocks to the car hire place. Along the way some shouty nutter bloke walked behind us shouting non-words, a bit like the piss head vicor from Father Ted.
Our car looked pretty good, it's a seven seater Ford Explorer (we think) , that is loaded with tech such as rear view night vision cameras, satnav, media centre, etc. now it was just a case of navigating out of Manhattan. This wasn't too hard although once we came out of the tunnel under the Hudson River the satnav woman had a spaz attack and for all we knew we were now in California.
We also developed an interesting noise in the car, from the rear left tyre there is a banging noise once you're above 40mph that is quite loud and blatantly not right. We tried higher speeds and it didn't go away, so Mark tried swerving the car around and that didn't fix it too. It's. Good job we didn't take out that extra breakdown cover or anything...
A few minutes later just as we're getting onto the correct road the dashboard starts going crazy telling us we have very low tyre pressures, oh good. So we find a nice safe abandoned industrial place to pull over in to investigate. Despite building a car back home Marks mechanical skills are not exactly great, Martin is up on the theory of mechanics so after a good discussion we decided that maybe air is required for the wheel thing.
A garage was close by so we checked the pressures, one was about 5 psi down but other than that everything was good. From working in IT we both have excellent problem solving skills so we switched the car off and on again and drove off hoping the problem would fix itself which amazingly it did. The loud banging noise however is still there (if you corner really hard, you can change the pitch of it). Our final move to fix the banging noise was to use the phone, so we plugged that into the media centre, put some tunes on, turned the volume up, job done.
A couple of hours in to the journey we saw a sign for a Walmart so we left the highway and followed the directions only to find they were lying about a Walmart being there, but we found a Target instead. No idea what target sold so we're pleased to find they did sell crisps (in typically small containers) which was what was required.
We stocked up on various car snacks and went to work modifying the Ford with Union Jack stickers. After that we needed to try out some stunt driving in the car so we practiced doing hand brake turns in the car park which were mildly successful despite leaving the Traction control on, and the handbrake being foot controlled.
Our destination was Cooperstown, a proper little town up north, and the place we were kipping for the night was only about 20mins up the road from that. We had aimed to be in Cooperstown for 5pm and with some spirited driving over the last 15mins of the drive we got there at 5:01, not bad.
It turns out that Cooperstown isn't that great unless you're looking for a town where every shop, bar and restaurant is closed, and all of the shops just sell baseball memorabilia. I kid you not, there must be a dozen baseball shops here just for buying baseball cards. Heaven forbid someone opening an ice cream shop or something.
We hightailed it out of Cooperstown and went to the place we can't remember the name of where we're staying the night. We found the motel easily in all of its 60s glory but Mark thought the office was closed as the door was all locked up until Martin pointed out that that was the Real Estate place next door.
After checking in we looked around nameless town (no sign of Bono or the edge) and this place too was also closed up so we went back the way we came and stopped at a lakeside restaurant to grab an evening meal. It was all home cooked stuff and was bloody gorgeous, definitely the best meal so far. In American tradition it was also ridiculously large so we were both stuffed again.
We were tired now so opted for an early night (not that there were any bars open in namelessville). So we went back to the motel to make good on it being International eat white chocolate day.
No comments:
Post a Comment