A Prairie-raised, almost-West-Coast-dwelling Canadian goes to NYC

We've been here for five days, so I have some catching up to do.

This is my first trip to New York, so everything has been strange and interesting, like the first time you eat a lychee nut.

The fun started at the Newark airport, or more precisely, leaving the Newark airport. You wouldn't think that would be so hard, right? First-timers, guess again! We landed at 10:30 PM after a decent enough AC flight from Vancouver. So far, so good. Our luggage all made it intact, another plus. But we weren't sure about the cabs & buses, so the helpful travel desk offering reasonably-priced shuttles into Manhattan seemed a safe bet. Ha ha, suckers!

First, our driver disappeared into the nether regions of the airport, leaving us standing like damn fools in the middle of the luggage-claim area. Okay, so he needs to get a sandwich or take a leak or something, fine.

But then we pile into his van, which already contained two condemned souls (silent ones, who didn't warn us about what was to come), and proceeded to make three, count 'em, three circumnavigations of all of the Newark airport terminals, in search of some other desperate fool waiting for a ride. But the fun hadn't really begun. Oh, not at all...