We arrived in New York City Thursday night at about 9pm. It's my first time here. There's something special about the first time you roll into the city. New York. In many ways its the center of the world. The epicenter. That's an amazing and humbling thing to wrap your mind around. My attempt at doing that consisted of quietly staring out the window from the backseat of our cab, my eyes jumping from the lights, to the bridges, to the water, to the people. For some reason though it never felt too big.
The cabby dropped us off at the 135th Street Y in Harlem. This was where we would be spending our first night. The building was over 80 years old, and looked it. 1003 was our room number. The narrow cream colored halls of our floor, lit by flourescents seemed to reach our for you as we passed through them. All the room doors were a bright sky blue with the metal room numbers painted over so many times they'd be unreadable were it not for the penetrating white light.
When we finally got our beat up old dead bolt door open we discovered our room to be not much of a room. It had a dresser, 2 bunks beds and a little bit of room to walk in between them, if you turned sideways. So our first night in New York ended there. Annie took the top bunk. I took the bottom, and our luggage filled the empty space.
When the lights went out I laid on my back for a minute or two staring out our room's lone window. Shining back through the old wooden pane, was the moon nearly full. Besides wishing I was in a bed where my feet didn't hang off the end, I thought of one other thing. We had made to the Atlantic. On Day 27 it could be said we finally made it Coast to Coast.
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