It's the Park Avenue Jinx
The very second we pulled onto Park Ave, I remembered. It had been a few years since I last travelled that road. Yet, the circumstances were the same. The BlogHer Conference was just a few miles away. Traffic was … special. Park Ave offered an opportunity to cut the travel time for those miles in half.
An hour plus cut to roughly half an hour.
BEAUTIFUL.
I should have known the second I recognized where I was that something was going to happen. Five years ago I sat in bumper-to-bumper-to-bumper traffic on Park Ave, waiting patiently to move closer to the conference. Five years ago a bicyclist came bustling by and cut things just a little bit too tight and went tumbling into the road after getting caught on my car mirror.
This year I made it a block further before something happened.
The thing about NYC is that you don’t need to be a particularly good driver to navigate the roads. You don’t need to be because nobody else is. It’s like a game of Frogger where your only mission is to keep moving forward without getting hit or hitting something. Everybody is moving slowly because everybody is trying to get to the same place. Pedestrians dart into intersections. Bicyclists weave between cars. Other drivers shove thousands of pounds of steel into places they really shouldn’t fit. You just have to carefully inch forward and hope for the best.
Sometimes when you go to inch forward, you realize that you better inch a little to the side because HOLY POTHOLE, BATMAN.
I marveled at the size and severity of dozens of potholes in New York. As I was driving an SUV, I rolled my way through most of them, grateful to be a little bit off of the ground so that my vehicle didn’t scrape the ground. THAT pothole, though. It was a grisly beast.
Thus, I swerved a little to the left. A foot, maybe.
There was a curb there.
A well-worn and ancient curb. It was so well-worn that it had a piece of rebar sticking out of it.
Hello, flat tire!
I kid you not, I was maaaaaybe a block away from where I had an incident the last time I drove in NYC to attend BlogHer. (Note to self: Take the long way next time. NO MATTER WHAT.)
A little light flashed on my dash the second the tire began to lose air. That was a very good thing because it allowed me a moment to turn into a side street and make my way to an empty parking space along the road. As I thunked my way into the space, I explained what had happened to the backseat driver named Alexis.
She was not amused.
It really wasn’t a big deal, though. We were two miles from our hotel in a safe location and I knew I had a spare tire in the back.
Easy.
This is the point when I will admit I do know how to change a tire. I do, but I have managed to go through life without actually proving it in a real-world situation. I had no plans of changing that at the time, so I called for roadside assistance. It’s part of our insurance and it made a lot of sense to let someone else change the tire in 45 seconds using good tools. If I had done it myself with the tools in my car, it would have taken an hour. Easily.
Roadside assistance promised that someone would be by to change the tire within 45 minutes. “I win!” I thought. That meant we would be moving again much faster than if I dealt with things myself.
So, Alexis and I settled in for our little 45 minute wait. We could have walked to the hotel or went exploring or something, but 45 minutes is no big deal. And what if they showed up early? It could happen!
It didn’t.
It really super didn’t.
After an hour of waiting, I called. It was at that point that I realized that I suuuuuuuper needed to find a restroom. It was a task that was probably two hours past due, to be honest. When roadside assistance said it would be just 15 more minutes, I resigned myself to being uncomfortable because there was no way I was going to walk away from the car at that point.
No way.
Half an hour later, the situation was desperate. I decided it was time to abandon the car no matter what, so I drug Alexis down a busy NYC street in search of a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts or ANYWHERE THAT HAD A BATHROOM OMG.
Apparently it’s super embarrassing to walk down the road with your mom when she’s doing the Peepee Dance. Who knew?
ANYWAY.
Once that situation was corrected, we found our way back to the car and waited some more. And some more. And some more. It took over two hours for roadside assistance to show up and then less than 120 seconds TOTAL for the tire to be switched.
By the time we reached the hotel, Alexis and I had missed the opening events of BlogHer 15. ‘Twas a sad moment, indeed. We made up for it by going to Times Square and eating ice cream, but the damage was already done.
Flat tires when you are two miles from your destination are super annoying. Waiting hours to get a spare put on is super annoying. Waiting hours and hours for a new tire is even more annoying.
But knowing with absolute certainty that you should never drive own Park Ave again? Well, that's just plain useful information.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Reader Comments (2)
And that picture? That picture is amazing. Especially in a few years when Alexis gets to take over the world and you can show proof she started her world domination so long ago.
i can't quit laughing at this:
"Apparently it’s super embarrassing to walk down the road with your mom when she’s doing the Peepee Dance. Who knew?"