Planes, Trains & Automobiles

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Things I learned yesterday:

1) If you want to get to NYC, don’t fly into Long Island Islip Macarthur Airport.
2) Even in the United States, train schedules can be wrong.

So, ironically, this turned out to be one of the longest travel days. I woke up about 7:30 a.m. in Lewisville, NC, and didn’t arrive in Manhattan until 9:30 p.m. I basically had to fly out of RDU International Airport and into Long Island Islip because I wanted to use the free ticket I had from Southwest, which I got through the college version of its Rapid Rewards Program (https://www.southwest.com/rapid_rewards/enroll/college_enroll.html). But, like the old saying goes, I got exactly what I paid for …

I had a two hour layover at the Baltimore Washington International Airport, and then had a three hour layover at LIRR Ronkonkoma - where I had the nastiest pizza ever at Scibelli’s (someone wrote a positive review about the restaurant here -- http://www.chowhound.com/topics/312185). Not only did my pepperoni pizza taste like pig fat, but there were flies everywhere and the joint’s bathrooms were out of order. What really frustrated me though was that Ronkonkoma’s train schedule (which can be found on here -- http://www.mta.info/lirr/Timetable/Branch.htm?Folder=Branch&Branch=Ronkonkoma&Direction=West&Period=Weekdays) was completely wrong. According to the Web site, trains to Penn Station leave every hour. But we arrived at the train station at about 4:30 p.m., and the next available train into Manhattan didn’t leave until 7:30 p.m. Tom Jeller, a pilot for US Airways, actually warned me about flying into Long Island a couple of days before I left.

Even though yesterday was schlep-y, I still ended up saving some money:
Plane ticket: FREE!
Cab to Ronkonkoma: ten dollars (which I split with Rachel)
Food: about 15 (includes the toxic pizza and a trip to A&W)
Cab to Brooke’s and Chris’ apartment: ten dollars (which I split with Rachel)
Train ticket: nine bucks
Celebratory beer (Corona light): 22 dollars for a 12 pack (I promise I shared)

Some of Rachel’s and my inside jokes from the day:
1) I brought a deck of cards, but we didn’t really know any card games … So we tried to make some up. This was a complete failure, but some of my favorites were:
a. Slap Jack (the Rachel cheating version)
b. Slap Jack (the Tanner cheating version)
c. Card-on-the-Forehead War
d. Two-person BS (think about it for a second …)
e. Tanner’s magic tricks
f. Rachel trying to copy Tanner’s magic tricks
g. Rachel’s weird made-up game which just turned into war
h. Tanner kicking Rachel’s ass in Go Fish
2) Getting Linda, a very nice and bilingual employee of the Long Island Rail Road, to give us a refund … because we accidentally bought peak fare tickets when we only needed the off peak. She is freakin’ awesome and made a hundred people wait for ten minutes.

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Photos

Raleigh Airport
The trip begins. It is about 10:30 am. At this point, we didn't know it was going to take 12 hours to get to NYC.

Brooke and Chris are very nice ...
because they let us sleep on their floor. Notice Rachel's shirt ... it is a Long Island shirt. She was wearing that shirt when we were stuck on the island yesterday. She screamed tourist!