Hey Team,

As a pure bred Californian, I hate rain. I realize “hate” is a strong word.

I HATE rain.

More importantly I hate being stuck in rain in a strange city with no leads on shelter and a backpack full of technology. And that has been happening far too often lately. Boston has spit on me, Philadelphia has drenched me and New York flat out ATTACKED me.

The last night Stephen, my sister and I spent in New York we decided we had had enough of the Big Apple (1. Does anyone still call it that? 2. Why did anyone EVER call it that?) and we were going to move on to Boston. We found a bus that went from Chinatown in NY to Boston for only $15. Granted, I had heard some slightly disconcerting things about the bus line and even the website said something along the lines of, “Don’t expect the driver to speak English.” But fifteen bucks! How could we lose? So we headed towards the “Fung Wah” bus. (Before you get the wrong idea, this story isn’t about the bus. In fact it was a disappointingly normal bus ride and there wasn’t a single old Asian lady with a live chicken in a wooden cage.)

In the immortal words of Sublime, “That’s - when - things - got - out - of - con - trol.”

When we got off the subway at our stop there was enough water flowing down the stairs into the station to rival Niagara Falls…although you probably would have stood a better chance of surviving the barrel ride. We only got about three steps up the stairs and into the real world before we were as wet as we were capable of being. As we ran down the street there were people standing under awnings at every shop gawking at the stupid wet kids. The first street we ran across had already developed a couple puddles.

They were calf deep.

We found that out through a careful process of trial and error…mostly error.

At the first corner we stopped under one of the awnings to ask a gawker for directions. “Oh, you’re trying to get to the buses. That’s easy. Just head down that way, back the way you just came from, and make a left.”

We were soaked in seconds, so now I was starting to get worried about Charley too. My backpack is water-resistant, not waterproof. An important (and scary) difference when you are running through a torrential downpour with a water-resistant backpack full of MacBook Pro.

We only had to run about two blocks to get to the buses but we might as well have been swimming. The end result would have been the same. Luckily, I was smart enough to ball up my long sleeve t-shirt and shove it under the shirt I was wearing to keep it dry during the run so I would have something warm to change into when we got on the bus.

It was soaked too.

We got to the bus stop about fifteen minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave. The rain stopped about eight minutes later. Just in time to make us feel stupid and give us something to think about on the four-hour bus ride in cold, wet clothes.

I’m done.

But you don’t have to be…

Seriously, don’t let me stop you.

Also, everything is back on track and doing well now. Updates got a little spread out over the last week but I’m going to do everything in my power to get at least new pictures up on the amtrekker site every day from here on. Wish me luck. Hope you guys liked today’s story!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 11:10 am.