Once again, we’ve had a fiasco trip to NY. First, it all started with the brilliant idea that we’d leave home closer to Grammy’s bedtime, so she’d sleep. So we ended up going to softball practice, and leaving at around 7:30 PM. As an added bonus, I spent the entire day in Buffalo at a meeting–and even though I was just a passenger, the eventual 16+ hours sitting in a car resulted in at least one decubitus.

For unknown reasons, Graem decided she wouldn’t sleep, even after several stops at gas stations to buy and beg for microwave access to warm her bottle. Naturally, the only alternative is to scream a couple of octaves above middle C, continuously for several hours. She finally fell asleep at around 10 PM. Meanwhile, her mamas get lost several times, taking every possible wrong turn between home and NYC. We missed our exit in Scranton, we missed the exit to get to the Holland Tunnel, we ended up in traffic on the Cross Bronx, ended up on the Harlem River Drive instead of the Deegan Expressway, successfully made it into Queens and Brooklyn, but accidentally crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and took a minor detour into lower Manhattan, backtracked onto the Belt Parkway only to find that it was closed at Exit 1, but then were able to re-route onto local routes and make it into my dad’s driveway at 1 AM. He was nonplussed, to say the least.

A highlight of the above trip was at 11 AM, when we stopped for a domestic and some coffee at McDonald’s. As I was trying to get out of the car to walk the dog, said dog snuck out behind me, leashless and ran right into Route 314 traffic. I ran after her screaming (no coffee needed, as I was in the middle of TIA) to no avail: the dog just stared me down and continued running between the eastbound and westbound lanes. Finally she took interest in all my screaming and arm-flailing, and decided to come running in my general direction. All I could see was oncoming traffic, and Bailey standing in the middle of the fast lane. I kept screaming, and it appeared that the white van actually saw me and slowed down, and Bailey trotted a few inches toward me and narrowly escaped being flattened. She finally ran toward me, and then kept running past me, into the McDonald’s parking lot and on to the strip mall lot. I figured at least she was in slower moving traffic, and had to deal with the fact that Graem was sitting unattended in our car with all the doors open. I pulled at my hair several times, as a number of people in the McDonald’s lot just ate their fries and watched the excitement. Finally I decided I might as well bring the car around to where Shawna was chasing Bailey down in the parking lot. As I got closer and started honking at Bailey, I was able to reach over and open the passenger door, and she hopped right in with Shawna shortly behind her. After some animal cruelty and another domestic, I broke down and lost it.

My dad was freaked about us coming in late, the dog tried unsuccessfully to take her own life, Grammy was screaming, we were both exhausted to the point of near-psychosis, and we had at least 2 more hours of driving. To top it off, the drive-thru line was about 17 cars long and the lobby was closed–read: no bathroom access. Shawna, pissed as ever, decides to squat right in front of our car, in the high beams, and takes a leak–mooning Route 314 that just about killed our dog.

Now it’s only Friday–we’re here til Sunday–and so far we’ve lost and unlost my wallet (many thanks to Laura & Lydia, who confirmed that I’m just a moron and left it in my briefcase from my first cross-state trip of the day), and I’ve just found out that all of the files that I brought to work on over the trip are incompatible versions.