Bowl Trip, Day One

I'm trying to get everything written down while all this is still pretty fresh.

Tuesday, December 28th started at 3:30 AM, in order to catch a 6 AM flight out of Birmingham. I was a little bleary-eyed, but I wolfed down a slice of cold pizza and hopped in the shower and drove us to the airport. Pretty surprising to see it so lively at such an early hour.

Our flight to Charlotte departed on time, a first good sign, since they'd seen six or so inches of snow in the last 36 hours or so. Then we started getting a little jumpy, as we waited for the LaGuardia leg of the trip to begin. But there were no worries. Takeoff and landing were both punctual. A car service took us to our hotel in the Chelsea section of Manhattan in about 45 minutes. Snow removal did not start well in NYC, so it was a little slow. But not as slow as the alumni bus, which we hear took nearly two hours.

Once we unloaded and got fed, we headed north toward Times Square, site of a 3 PM news conference. It was a little crisp outside and we were just trying to thaw out and figure out what was going on, but next thing we know, KSU Athletic Director John Currie introduced himself and visited with us for a spell. He even brought our mascot Willie Wildcat over for a photo op, and mentioned my wife as part of his comments, noting her 14-year bowl streak (she's never missed a K-State bowl game) and that she's a double graduate. We both were pretty well charged as we went back out into the evening. Ann has friends who were negatively affected by Mr. Currie's decisions, but he couldn't have been nicer to us and went out of his way to be friendly. We were very impressed by him.

This was my first walking experience in New York, and the shell-shock wore off quickly. Perhaps NY gets a bad rap, perhaps I watch too much TV. Because there were legions of people out and about, but I was never scared to walk down the street.

Our next step was to find food. Remember it had snowed nearly two feet two days prior, and by now we'd been up about 16 hours on little sleep. So we navigated more than we walked, due to snow and the throngs of people who were out. Ann successfully navigated the subway system to the Union Square stop, which was an absolute swamp of ice and snow, and right when we were about to punt and just find food and go home, we found Gramercy Tavern, which is what we were after. I'm continually amazed at Ann's sense of direction, which was spot on.

So we grabbed a beer and started waiting for a table. 45 minutes later, we sat down and ate some awesome food. I had some pork shoulder, which was terrific. It truly was a great experience. The beer was also very good. This event may have gone on further, if we were closer to base camp and not so tired.

So with our bellies full, we got ourselves home close to 11 PM and looked out our window at the Empire State Building and went to bed.

What a day. And there was plenty more where that came from.