Los Angeles to New York (10.45 to 19.29)

We finished off our doughnuts, bought at the breakfast shop, as we queued up the stairs to get air-side. The security process was as grueling as usual but with a twist, there was a party of teenage boys who were returning to Europe after some kind of group experience. The staff members with them were highly ineffectual and the boys were finding it impossible to pass through the scanners without setting them off. To make matters much worse these were boys who had given up washing or changing their clothes for the duration of their experience. The body odour was overpowering and the fact that they had to remove their shoes made matters worse. The immigration officials, who needed closer contact with the party, were worse off than we, the general public. There was much breath-holding and one lady walked through the mêlée spraying air-freshener to the great appreciation of the queue. One youth was particularly annoying, his hand luggage when x-rayed revealed a gun-shaped object, his belt set off the personal scanner so he had to remove it and place it on another tray. At one point he had his belongings going through all three scanners. We, with characteristic British pessimism, now knew that we would be sitting with this party all the way to New York We made it through security and established ourselves in the departure lounge by our assigned gate – the group did not join us there.
We were again separated by our boarding cards but it was easily rectified by a swap. We had no in-flight entertainment as we were too tight to buy headsets and we were not fed so we arrived in JFK Airport ready to eat.
On this leg of the journey we were flying against the clock, we lost time due to the time-zones as well as the actual duration of the flight so we reached New York in the early evening. While I awaited our baggage on the baggage reclaim belt Julia set off and made enquiries how we could reach our hotel in Manhattan. By the time we had the luggage we also had three alternatives to get us to the Gershwin Hotel, taxi at a flat rate of $50, bus transfer costing $20 each and public transport at $7 each. We opted for the cheapest alternative, a bit of a recurring theme. We found the Skytrain which connects the terminals and has one line out of the airport into the city arriving in Jamaica Center. The Skytrain is a fast modern monorail and it was a quite comfortable ride even standing as we were due to it being full of airport employees. When we reached the Jamaica terminal we were already wondering about our decision. We each had a heavy bag, from the hold, and a hand-luggage bag to cope with as we followed the stream of pedestrians up to a set of barriers where they inserted a card to be allowed through.
We found out that we needed two $5 cards to pay for the journey that we had just taken and two $2 cards to travel anywhere on the subway. When I attempted to use the ticket machine a station employee came over to help and put the whole $14 on one card, we passed the card through the barrier to get Julia out and passed it back to release me. We repeated the process to get us into the subway system and we followed signs a good distance to the required platform. The first subway train was the old style, heavily graffitied and quite a rough complement of travelers, a bit like the set from Death Wish, (1974). The baggage although heavy for us now became a concern in case it got stolen, so I remained standing with it heaped at my feet. We changed platforms and trains at Penn Station and we seemed to have changed eras at the same time, the train was crisply clean and there was an indicator of each station we were approaching. We emerged from the system at 28th Street but our elderly eyes had misread the hotels address as being where 27th East crossed 3rd instead of correctly where it crossed 5th. We set off loaded like polar explorers but without the sled in entirely the wrong direction. We were saved by two bystanders who knew the area and made us retrace out steps to the hotel.
As I wrote earlier we had read internet reviews of the hotels and we should have been warned off the Renoir in San Francisco, we had also read that the Gershwin was basic and preferred by back-packers. We had thought of asking to have it changed but were placated when we saw that the booking was for a superior room. When we came to book in I was relieved to hear the receptionist confirm the superior status of our room and we headed upstairs to dump our luggage and get something to eat.
Superior is a comparative word, all I can say is that it worries me that there were any rooms inferior to ours, gone were the massive bed(s) of Californian hotels, this was a bed for close friends, the en-suite bathroom featured no plug in the sink and a bath suited for small children and the TV refused to cooperate with us in any way. Hunger persuaded us to put all of that to one side and we set off into Manhattan to feed ourselves.
The redeeming feature of the hotel was immediately apparent we were only a short walk to the Empire State Building and restaurants were plentiful within a few blocks. We ate in a nothing special establishment but there was no chance of it closing on us, it was open 24 hours. We were right there when Michael Phelps won his eighth gold in the Olympic pool in Beijing to be the spontaneous applause of the entire restaurant. Once again the meal was big and meaty and capable of feeding several people, but it served its purpose and we returned to the hotel. We were tired from all the walking and carrying but ready to take on the New York experience.