New York or Bust!

Today we accomplished one of the main goals of our trip: We moved Rebecca’s things into her apartment. However, everything did not go perfectly smoothly (surprise! surprise!). When we arrived at U-haul to pick up our truck, they informed us that, even though we had made a 24-hour reservation, and even though we were paying for a 24-hour reservation, we could only had the truck for six hours. And, if we kept it for more than 6 hours, we would be charged a $50 late fee. Since we had to take the truck back to our RV in New Jersey, load it, drive to Manhattan, find Rebecca’s apartment, unload everything, and drive back to New Jersey, 6 hours were really not enough. And, since we had paid for 24 hours, it was very frustrating to be told matter-of-factly that we could only had it for 6 hours. Due to the fact that U-haul would not honor the contract we made with them and since we were already paying a lot for the truck and did not think we should have to pay $50 more, we had a very stressful day trying to get the truck back to them by 4:00 p.m. We ended up making it by 5:00 p.m., but we were unable to organize anything in Rebecca’s apartment. We simply had to drop everything and run. We are very unhappy with U-haul for adding serious stress to our day and for preventing us from completely moving in as we had planned.

U-haul aside, we had some very interesting experiences today. We drove through the Lincoln Tunnel from Secaucus, NJ to Manhattan, NY and through the Holland Tunnel from Manhattan, NY to Jersey City, NJ. In both cases, we were actually driving under the surface of the Hudson River. What an amazing engineering feat!

The first two photos show Rebecca's stuff in the basement of the RV. The other two photos show the Secaucus Wal-mart where we were parked for two whole days.

Rebecca’s apartment is quite charming and in an equally charming neighborhood. From her window she can watch a festival that is held each weekend (maybe just in warm weather??) where they play music outside and have booths and entertainment. It makes the whole neighborhood seem so festive and folksy. Quite pleasant!

We were lucky that a train runs in front of her building and, under the train, there is ample parking. So, unlike most places in New York, we could actually park right by her building. We unloaded from there and then left the U-haul there for about 30 minutes while we did a few things in her apartment.

Getting to and from the U-haul pick-up location from our home-base in the Wal-Mart parking lot was quite an experience. We had to take a cab, and it cost us $18.00 to go the 3 miles the first time and $25 miles to return. What a racket. We'd have been happy to walk, except we had no way to cross the New Jersey Turnpike on foot!

Once we returned to our camper after the big move was over, we were quite thrilled to experience our camper for the first time without all Rebecca’s things. We put the slide out and enjoyed all the space. We went over to Bazooka’s again and had dinner.

Like last night, tonight we are going to sleep in the Sacaucus, NJ Wal-mart parking lot. It is such a nice service Wal-mart offers---inviting RVs to stop and/or spend the night. Of course, I’m sure most RVers are like us in that, since they are stopping at a Wal-mart, they go ahead and buy a few things.

Although this trip has been fun and exciting so far, in some ways, our vacation starts tomorrow since it is the first day that we are going to set up at a campground and plan to stay there a whole week. We are looking forward to some slower days!