If you will remember yesterday's episode where self-proclaimed "Ace Tour Guide" Allie got us lost on our way to dinner, you will know how important it would be for us to search out and hire the world's foremost New York Tour Guide. To keep the possibly of lawsuit at a minimum we will just call him Tour Guide From Hell, or TGFH.
TGFH was a native New Yorker who hailed from Queens. He was proud of his status and described it to us ad nauseam. He was hired to lead us to the Balloon Inflation Festival at Central Park. We were all excited to get a professional tour and the little kids were excited to see the parade balloons up close and personal.
TGFH knew his city and its history well and entertained us with important facts along the way to the park. We saw who lived in that apartment building and this apartment building. It was a cornucopia of celebrities living right in the neighborhood where we wandered. We saw where Madonna had her very first job as a.....something. I can't seem to remember now but it was impressive in its obscurity. We saw where John Lennon was killed, "RIGHT HERE IN THIS SPOT WHERE I'M STANDING!! RIGHT HERE!" We learned who killed Mr. Lennon and believe it or not, we also learned exactly why! TGFH was there in the neighborhood when it happened....really...
TGFH knew everything about his city except how to get us to the Balloon Inflation Festival at Central Park. The following was not his fault but we chose to blame him anyway. Thinking that we wouldn't have a huge crowd attending the festival because tickets had to be bought in advance, we strolled along behind TGFH for awhile oblivious to the steadily increasing number of park seekers. Before too long our guide stopped us and yelled for us to follow his green and black umbrella if we got separated. It was then that we realized we were part of a million man march on Central Park. The crowd was massive and working with a herd mentality. We were slowly going down one block with barricades guiding us along. There was no option of getting out of our situation because the streets were lined with New York's finest making sure we all kept moving. After a longer than I would have preferred amount of time, Cody told our guide to give it up. We didn't need to stay in this crowd. We would forget the balloon festival. TGFH informed us we couldn't leave because he had already asked a policeman and told we could not exit. He evidently read Cody's face clearly because he immediately started working us through the crowd to the edge next to the barricade. Once there he asked again if we could exit. The policeman said no. He then walked away to another barricade emergency and TGFH removed the barricade and told us to hurry through. Instead of stopping us though, he informed us of a shortcut we could take. Like the rest of the herd, we mindlessly followed him up a sidewalk until we ran into another crowd. As we blended into this crowd Charlee disappeared. In seconds we were running through the crowd screaming her name. Before we found her someone yelled that Claire had disappeared too. This was a nightmare in the making but Charlee was quickly found and a really nice family came up holding Claire's hand. Both girls were crying their little eyes out and hugging their mommy and daddy as tight as they could.
TGFH didn't seem too phased by the exercise and started us off again. In a few minutes we realized more people were headed in a direction opposite from ours. When we stopped one of them and asked we discovered TGFH, native New Yorker and Ace tour guide, was leading us away from the park. Cody fired him on the spot and he wandered off into the night. He may still be lost.
You may ask how any event could be worse. Well, I'll tell you...when we were in the worst of the crowd it began to rain....hard. TGFH was the only one with an umbrella. But to end things on a positive note we wandered around town for a while and found an awesome hole-in-the-wall pizza place. We stuffed ourselves on New York decadence then found our way back to the hotel.
Tomorrow I will tell you about the "select party only nazi" we encountered on day 3.
We weren’t allowed to dance and no mixed swimming. The exception was the time we spent in YMCA summer camp, where boys and girls swam together. I think having us out of the house in the summer became more important than the no mixed swimming rule. There was a ninth grade dance at school, all of us kids who went to church together were taken to the movies while the other kids in our class were dancing at a school party. The movie starred Maureen O’Hara, “The Battle of the Villa Fiorita”,it wasn’t even a western. In high school if I went to a party with a girl and dancing came it I would say that it was against my religion. Of course my wife is a dancer. If we are somewhere where there is dancing, people assume that I am jerk who won’t dance with his wife. They won’t believe I can’t until they see me try. When Mary Wayne was giving us lessons she told me my dancing was hopeless and when I danced with my daughter I should just shuffle around slowly.
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