31st of October – Flight and arrival

I had a flight a few hours before noon so it was an early departure from home but food in the lounge helped things a bit. The flight was fairly uneventful and the plenty of legroom on the front row was definitely a treat. 

Only having a carry-on I had to wait for the rest of the group to get their luggage (all 30 of them) before we could go through immigration and get picked up. And when arriving outside we had to wait for the bus as it was not allowed to park at the airport but had to stay somewhere nearby and show up when called. I realized that when the bus finally arrived I could have taken the train to the city and checked into the hotel before we ever left the airport.

But when finally in the bus we were on the way with AC in a slightly humid 15-ish degrees towards the hotel near the centre of the city. Circling around on the road to enter the Lincoln tunnel the bus driver suddenly pulled over and stopped to the side just before the entrance and stepped out. A bit of waiting and seeing him walking around we found out that there were issues with the braking system so he couldn’t take the bus any longer. While I’m glad that he stopped when finding out he couldn’t safely brake it resulted in more annoying wait and it was close to an hour before another bus came by, transferred all our luggage and took us further on our now quite time-consuming tour. The shoulder near the tunnel was huge so there were no problems lining the two busses up next to each other without interfering with the traffic. Fortunately there was a bus-/truck-workshop just around the corner from where we had stopped so the bus replacement arrived quickly after being requested.

All this was getting quite frustrating as I had been hoping to go by the marathon Expo today after arriving to get it over with. They would close the entrance at 1900 (and close at 2000) and sitting at home and planning it looked as if I would have plenty of time. But with these multiple waits and delays I saw my plans slowly disintegrating. We arrived at around 1800 at the hotel, 4 hours after landing (had I taken the train it would have taken less than an hour and a half). I decided to chance it so I quickly unloaded my bag, grabbed a subway card and took the subway to the expo where I arrived 20 minutes before closing for entry. Success! And there were no queues anywhere so it was a relaxing walk around to have a look – considering more than 50.000 people run the marathon I could imagine the next couple of days it will be more chaotic.

The Expo had a long wall with names of everyone who had signed up. It was a long wall. And I could fortunately find my own name there.

Happy with having retrieved my bag with the stuff included in the price (bib, shirt and a few other various goodies) I returned to the hotel with my stash and went our for a quick dinner in form of a pretty damn good burger.