Trip to NYC

Last Thursday my wife and myself made a trip to New York City. My wife and I were contracted to deliver two thirteenth century wood carvings(Wooden carved liturgical figures of St. Florian and St. George from the workshop of Michael Pacher (German, 1435-1498) to Christie's auction warehouse.


We left Maine at 4 AM and headed south. The trip started OK, but then we hit a little traffic in Mass. and it was taking a little to long, so your pal kicked up a notch and pushed down on the old Volvo wagon accelerator, and we were off again.

As we got closer to the city...... we were looking for the FDR...... and we found it....... and it was a parking lot. Living in Maine for the last 10 years you forget what real traffic is like. In Maine, traffic means waiting to cross route 1 for 30 seconds. Well any way we moved very slowly down the FDR looking for 54Th street. Finally arriving at 54TH we turned and because we timed our arrival just at lunch there were millions of people on the street. And what that means is that any time you want to make a left or a right turn you would have to wait for a least 200 people to cross the street.

Needless to say it took a while to reach our destination, Christie's warehouse. It was now time to look for a proper parking space. It's well known there all kinds of parking spaces especially for out of staters.......not! But praise be Jebus we got a space right in front of the place, sort of. I could only partially pull in and was sticking out a little bit. But it's the city, drivers could give a crap if you are not parked properly. So all was good so far. We unloaded the statues, one worth 50 thousand dollars and the other 70 grand.

On my way out the door at Christie's I stopped to ask the men on the loading dock how to get to the FDR for our return trip. Well I want to tell you that no one knew how to get there, because no one drives in the city.

So I did make it out of the city and back home in one day. It's is not a trip that I want to make any time soon.

A observation about driving in NYC. And it is that people that drive on the streets there have a understanding about how to get around. And it is that they expect you to do everything to get to your destination. And that means cutting everyone off, blowing your horn at every opportunity and just being anouying, but only to people from away. It's very interesting.