In the 7th grade, I journeyed to New York city as part of a drama club field trip during which I got to see the sights and hear the sounds of the classic metropolis. Never had I returned until Friday, 8/3, when Brandy and I traveled to NYC for her anniversary present - to see The Police in concert at Madison Square Garden.

Until now, I’ve never known my own capacity for cutting off people in traffic. After sitting still for nearly one hour, my instincts in assholery kicked into high gear, enabling me to move across four lanes of traffic in a single diagonal. What glory!

The morning started off not so well. My car was leaking oil, so I hurried it in to the local Honda dealership for an assessment. Luckily, it was just a bad oil filter and gasket, so they got that replaced and sent me on my way - but still an hour later than we anticipated. Then we hit two really bad patches of construction on I-80, each one adding nearly an hour from our travel time. After that came the bad directions from Yahoo! that ended up putting us in circles in Newark. We got that figured out and made it through the Lincoln Tunnel only to be brought to a very long halt on Dyer and 42nd (yeah, made a wrong turn coming out of the tunnel). By the time we made it to our hotel, the three hours we had hoped to have for general tourism had vanished, leaving us just enough time to walk around the block and have a quick meal at Chipotle. It did not live up to our ideals for the trip, though we still had fun.

But then we got to the Garden, found our floor seats, and sat back for an hour of opening act and over two hours of standing once The Police took the stage. Women really like Sting. I’m not sure they knew who the other two guys were, which was okay, since Sting was the only one of the three to exude anything approaching enthusiasm. It was easy to see which of the three had been consistently performing over the past 20 years.

The concert was great, very lively, mixed well. The Garden is a great place for a concert if you have decent seats.

Afterwards, we crashed at the hotel, slept in together for the first time in a year, and had breakfast at Lindy’s before getting back in the car and heading home.

Now that I’ve experienced NYC as an adult, I have fewer misgivings about visiting it for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, both seasonal events in which Brandy has wanted to partake. We just have to prep Gareth for a four hour car ride.

Oh, side note.  That photo up there isn’t mine.  In order to maximize time spent with my wife and not my viewfinder, I elected to leave my camera at home.  It was a much appreciated gesture as I’ve been known to sully experiences by, say, keeping my hand on the camera instead of holding the hand of my wife.