Chinatown, 15' Budget Moving Truck, and that was the easy part

We shipped our must-keep belongings via Amtrak from Oregon to New Jersey. Why not ship to New York, you ask? Because Penn Station Manhattan does not have a loading dock for large shipments. Double-parking on the streets of Mid-town Manhattan, only to hoof up form underground a few boxes at a time--nightmare. But Newark Penn Station had a drive-up loading dock. Much simpler and it wasn't too much farther than Penn Station NY.

Rewind. We didn't have computer or internet access for 5 days. So we went to the local library to googlemap directions from out bitty apartment on Long Island to Newark. After staring at the outlined path that google generated, we realized that while we would avoid toll bridges, it wasn't "a straight shot." Being timid and unsure about my navigation strength in NYC, I decided to follow the directions instead of winging it as we drove.

We drove down the LIE to Queens; pretty cool, traffice was smooth. Entered another interstate with took us over Brooklyn. Then I directed us over the Williamsburg Bridge. Oh crap--- are we in Chinatown? We made a wrong decision. I thought I made an error in navigation because I thought were supposed to go over Statan Island. But we ended up on Manhattan Island-- exactly the place I wanted to avoid. Damnit. I jumped out of the truck, as traffice was going nowhere, to ask a traffic cop where the hell to go. She was new to the area and didn't know what to tell me, so she directed me the the "white guy" on the corner adjacent to us. He told me to turn around and go back over the bridge. Let me remind you how large our moving truck is, and that nobody uses a freaking turn signal in this state, and thats noone wants to let a truck merge lanes. 40 minutes later we successfully completed a figure 8 through one-way, narrow streets, flirting with gridlock. What do I mean by flirting with gridlock? People purposefully block the intersection if they want to trun left across traffic. Cars are configured in a yin-yang manner, until the crosstraffic has a red light. The sterotypical guy with an accent hung out with window and was delivering the F-bomb to some poor chap who was following behind us and couldn't move. Once we got to where we could see the Williamsburg Bridge, I realized that we were, in fact, on the road we were supposed to be. Funny thing about those East Coast road signs; they are few and far between. I was the street name on the awning of a random shoppe.


More to follow......