Car services and apartment keys......

Once at LaGuardia I managed to find baggage claim, grab my suitcase and for $3.00 rent a baggage cart. I was set. Now all I had to do was give the car service I'd ordered a call. My daughter A. had told me that last Christmas she and her friends had to wait 20 or so minutes for the same car service to arrive, so I found a bench to sit down and gave Carmel a call. To my surprise the car I'd ordered must have been circling to airport because the lady on the phone gave me directions to find the car posthaste. That's when things started going downhill.

The nice lady on the phone asked me if I saw a red (or blue ??) canopy outside. I explained that I was still inside but I was sure I could find the canopy once I made my way outside. Yeah! Sure! I couldn't even remember the color she'd said. That led to my wandering about (and taking a couple of unneeded rides on some kind of shuttle bus) for close to half hour. In the end, with the help of another car service driver, I found my driver, who was not too pleased at my antics. I think he enjoyed the fact that I was so desperate when I spotted him that I literally stopped three lanes of traffic as I darted across lugging my bright red suitcase.

Once in the car I tried to be very nice so he'd know I appreciated him hanging around until I found him. I don't think he understood a word I said though. We hit another little bump in the road when I thought he was heading downtown and I needed to go uptown. How did he expect me to know he had to get around Morningside Park before he could get to West 120th Street? And then I had to ask him to stop around the corner from my final destination so I could pick up the keys. I'm sure he was glad to get rid of me. But he ended up being quite polite after he saw the nice fat tip I gave him. Whew!

Okay. I have the apartment keys. I found the apartment building. Someone was leaving as I arrived and they held the door open for me and my luggage. So far so good. Once inside the building I couldn't find the elevator. I asked the first person who passed by and they looked at me as if I were crazy. The elevator was right in front of me -- disguised very well if you ask me. It looked like another door. You had to pull it open to enter. Oh well, I got in, rode to the sixth floor, and walked to the apartment I'd sublet for the next eight weeks. Now, just stick the keys in the lock, open the door, and walk in -- right? Not so fast.

I did put the keys in the locks and....even though they fit, I couldn't get the frickin' door to open. I promise I stood there for a full twenty minutes turning the locks every way I could think. There were two locks -- one on top and one on bottom. I must have been unlocking one and locking the other. Then....vice versa. Finally the door opened and I was in the apartment. No surprises (thank the good lord!), the apartment was just as the pictures I'd been sent showed.

So I really had an apartment in New York! No need to find a hotel. I called everyone I was supposed to call to tell them I'd actually managed to make it there and then unpacked some. It wasn't long before I realized I was hungry. The only problem was that I really didn't know how I'd finally managed to open the apartment door so I really, really didn't want to face that battle again. But, the alternative was to never leave the apartment or hire someone to sit there whenever I went out so they'd be there to open the door for me when I returned. Since neither of these alternatives were feasible, and I was really hungry, I decided I'd have to chance being able to open the door after I got some food.

Long story short, I picked up a sandwich and a few other things at a store across the street, AppleTree grocery and deli, and headed back to the apartment and that dang door. It didn't take me quite as long this time -- maybe ten minutes to get in. Sigh! For a couple of days it was like that whenever I went out. I never knew how long it would take me to unlock the f*cking door.

Finally, I emailed the lady I was subletting from (who was in Paris for the summer), and she told me the locks were old and had been used so much that they did stick sometimes. She said I could tell the guardian or just try locking the bottom lock (which is what she does). So, by locking only the bottome lock I was able to start getting the door to unlock with just a couple of turns of the key. Sometimes it unlocked the first time I turned the key.

So ended my first day in the city. My emotions had been like a rollercoaster so I was dead tired. Too tired to think about being afraid or worry about anything. I slept well -- until about 5:15 or so. That's when I realized what direction the apartment faces -- north east. And every morning the sun would wake me as it rose, brightly shining in the window next to the bed, by the fire escape -- the window with no curtain, only blinds that didn't reach all the way to the bottom of the window. Then, after a few minutes of relief from the light, the sun would make its way to the other two huge windows in the bedroom and brightly shine through them.

Let's just say it was the rare morning that I slept passed 5:30 whithout being waked up.