Downhill skiing in NYC

Yesterday we went to the big apple.

On accident.

Well...kinda.

I tagged along with Steve and one of his coworkers as they headed up to NYC for a business meeting.

Drove up Friday morning, back Saturday.

His meeting and our hotel were actually in Nassau County (right outside of Queens on Long Island).
Since it was a quick trip, we didn't plan on making it into Manhattan.

HOWEVER...

Thanks to ONE missed exit and a sneaky GPS (Mandy, I don't know if we can ever trust you again),
we somehow ended up paying $11 to go through the Lincoln Tunnel and wind up on 8th avenue.

Thought process:

"Um...really tall buildings...
lots of people everywhere...
lots of cabs everywhere...
8th avenue...
52nd street...
wait a second, 42nd street...?
Holy crap, we're smack in the middle of New York."

Realization shortly followed by:

"HOLY CRAP, we're DRIVING in New York City!?!?
I swore I would never do this!"

And finishing with a grand thought:

"How in the world do we get out of here???"

And of course all these thoughts happened in about a half a second as we suddenly found ourselves fighting for our lives in the traffic.

*Note: picture does NOT do the traffic justice. That was a "slow" moment when I realized I should somehow document this experience.

It was hilarious and INSANE.
We were pretty much freaking out the whole time, but couldn't stop laughing about it later.

Our GPS was no longer trustworthy and couldn't get a signal because of all the tall buildings anyway, so luckily we were able to call Steve's NY contact we were meeting and he, laughing the whole time, helped us out of our predicament.

As we laughed about our experience later, Steve and I came up with a pretty accurate analogy for how we felt coming up out of that tunnel.

Entitled:
Driving in NYC is like going downhill skiing...


Driving through the Lincoln Tunnel for us was like going up a ski lift.
But when you get to the top, you realize the only way down is a double black diamond.
No greens, no blues,
just very VERY black.
And you look at your friend who brought you up there in the first place, swearing that if you make it out alive you will KILL them.
But that doesn't matter, because you haven't made it out alive yet.
So you try to go slowly down the mountain, but of course, that's impossible.
If you go slow, you die.
You HAVE go at the pace of the mountain.
And you're surrounded by experts who look at you with your "out of state plates" and curse you for not knowing what you're doing.
But eventually you start getting the hang of it, and before you know it, you're at the bottom.
You think to yourself, Wow we should do that again!
And then, realizing how incredibly foolish you just looked, you think, well, maybe not.

And you're glad you took a picture and have a funny story to post on your blog.