Community Connections: Home from our honeymoon

When I was younger I used to love to travel. I absolutely used to adore being in big cities, having John Hughes-esque type of adventures navigating airports, road trips and other associated potential travel stories to add to the memory bank.

I had never been on a trip or vacation where I didn’t wish I had one more day left and that odd disappointment of being back home after the adventure was over. This is why I was very excited to go on my honeymoon a couple of weeks ago. I would be returning to New York City with my bride and even get to visit some old friends at a wedding in upstate. It had been 10 years since I’ve been back to the Empire State and I figured my love for adventure would still be alive and well.

We left on a Thursday to get down to the San Francisco airport (because you know, for some reason it’s cheaper to rent a car and get a hotel in the Bay Area than it is to pay the difference in ticket prices to fly out locally), and we got a little bit of a late start because I had a grant that I had to mail out that morning in order for it to get on the desk of the folks hopefully giving us some money by the deadline. So, we ended up not even getting to the Bay Area until close to 10 in the evening.

As we arrived at the hotel, I could instantly tell you that my wife had booked the hotel for economics and not convenience and proximity to the airport. I’m not going to tell you the name of the hotel, but I will tell you that my point was proven when I asked the front desk guy if the bathroom window closed or locked, and he responded with, “No, but we have a cinder block fence outback, nobody’s getting over that.”

We got a few hours of shuteye, got up at 2 a.m. and headed to the airport, flew five hours with a random three-hour layover in North Carolina, then we hopped a plane to Syracuse. We navigated some weird construction at the Syracuse airport, got our second rental car of the trip and headed to my old boss’ house and had a great evening of catch up, watching game one of the Red Sox-Yankees post-season series and trying to figure out how long we had actually been up given the time distance.

The next day we headed up another hour or so to lakeside resort where we’d be staying the evening after we attended a very beautiful wedding that took place at a winery.

Sunday was all about taking the wife around to some of my old stomping grounds in Syracuse and playing catch up with some other friends I had while I spent time on the East Coast.

Monday morning we hopped a train and headed to Manhattan. For some reason in my head, I thought I had booked us tickets into Grand Central Station, which would have only been two blocks from our hotel, but I realized as soon as I got off the train that I had actually booked us into Penn Station, which was a lot further.

When I was in New York before, there wasn’t Uber, so we would have either had to hail a cab or lug our bags into the really hot, really humid, really crowded Metro subway system. Instead, there was an Uber turning the corner to pick us up within literally 30 seconds.

We checked into our hotel, exhaustively tried to peek at Times Square just so my wife could have the experience, then gave into our exhaustion and had a great night just chilling in the hotel room watching game three of the Sox-Yankee series.

The next day we put our adventure faces on and went to visit the Twin Towers Memorial and walked the Brooklyn Bridge, (although I wish I would’ve left my Boston Red Sox hat at the hotel, because walking into Brooklyn wearing a Red Sox hat after they just won the series got me more than serious dirty looks.)

The trip was topped off on Wednesday with a trip to Broadway to see “The Lion King,” which I recommend everybody go see, because it was absolutely incredible.

In the morning, we hopped into a Town Car, which drove us the hour it takes to get to the JFK airport, and we were back in Pacific Standard Time by the afternoon. We stayed the night in Petaluma just to give us a cushion of rest, because we also knew the next night we agreed to attend the Masquerade Ball fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Club of the Redwoods.

It was indeed a whirlwind, and the verdict is in — despite the 10 years since I had been last, my adventurous spirit is still intact, but for whatever reason, whether it’s the fact I’m older or the true appreciation I’ve come to have for our community, a new item was listed to highlights, because when I look back on this trip, I’m going to immediately think of the joy I had of seeing old friends, sights, “The Lion King” and the excitement of coming home.

Brian S. Millett is a project manager for the city of Eureka, and can be reached at bmillett@ci.eureka.ca.gov.