Before coming to college, I never really considered myself a spontaneous person. Every once in a while I would do something impulsive, but I would never classify myself as “spontaneous.” I loved plans and felt they were necessary. However, this completely changed when I got to college.
A few weeks ago, my best friend and I were sitting in a lecture together when we saw the comedy group “Please Don’t Destroy” posted that they were having a show in New York City and Los Angeles. We love New York and always dreamed of visiting the city together. She jokingly suggested we go to their show in New York since it was on a Friday, a day we both don’t have classes. Though she was only kidding, I saw this as the perfect opportunity for us to see the city together, so we researched flights.
We quickly realized it would actually be relatively cheap to go for a day. With no planning or consideration, we booked a flight for 5 am on Friday, Sept. 28 and a returning flight at 10:30 am the next day. We decided not to book a hotel room because we could simply walk around New York City all night. Yeah, we did not think this through at all.
All we had planned for this trip was seeing the “Please Don’t Destroy” show along with last-minute tickets we found to sit in the audience for “The View.” Keep in mind, neither of us have ever watched an episode of “The View.”
All week leading up to this crazy trip, my mom warned me that it was presumed to rain. I thought she was just being a neurotic mom so I didn’t really pay much attention to it. We figured we would bring umbrellas in case and we would be fine.
With that, we were off to the airport at 3:30 am. The flight went perfectly and we thought we were off to a great start. Wrong. We got out of the airport and realized just how much it was raining and just how cold it was.
We started off the day by taking a bus to a friend’s apartment to drop off our stuff and began heading to “The View.” To say our stuff was soaked would be an understatement. We, and all our stuff, were drenched. But we didn’t let that ruin our mood! We changed quickly into new outfits and headed to ABC studios. We ended up having a great time at “The View,” but it was definitely a weird experience. As a journalism major and a media production and management major, we thought the behind the scenes activities were very cool.
As soon as we left, we were stoked to see that the rain had suddenly cleared, though it was still quite chilly outside. We were trying to figure out how to change out of our soaking clothes, so we hopped into a Zara fitting room to change into our clothes for the day. After Zara, we needed to figure out how to get to The Met, which we were able to find last-minute tickets to ahead of time. We decided, mainly because we couldn’t figure out public transportation, to walk through Central Park. It was just a 30 minute walk we thought! This was where our day started to go downhill.
Two minutes into our walk through Central Park, it started POURING, and I mean torrential downpour. I’m born and raised in South Florida, but I have never seen rain this bad. Turns out, this rain started the worst day of rain for New York this year. Everywhere began flooding, we were miserable. I had on linen pants and converse, which were quickly drenched. You can imagine how gross I felt. After a 30 minute walk through the park, we made it to The Met. We looked like wet dogs. We were shivering. This is where my mental breakdown started.
I felt disgusting in my outfit, I needed to change immediately. We decided to go buy new clothes and come back to The Met later. We took a ridiculously expensive uber to Target to try and find new clothes. When I tell you this Target had the most sad looking clothing section, I mean it. There was simply no exceptional clothing to buy. It was time for plan B. I walked into the Target bathroom and stuck all my clothes under a hand dryer. You could not make this up.
After drying my clothes enough, we started proposing a new plan. This was getting a hotel room. My stepmom came in clutch and helped us book a hotel room. I cannot thank her enough for saving us, I owe her my life. We got into our hotel room and started talking about our next steps. We had two and a half hours until our show and two different things we wanted to do beforehand: The Met and shopping in Greenwich Village. Long story short, due to the flooding, every place we wanted to visit in Greenwich was closed, so our decision was made for us.
We were pumped for The Met! We both shockingly have never been there before. After taking another incredibly expensive uber, we arrived. We eagerly walked up to the entrance only to be told they closed early due to the weather. All I could do at this point was laugh, it was absolutely unbelievable.
At this point, we decided to just head to the show early. The show ended up being fantastic. They were absolutely hysterical and I left the show with my cheeks hurting from laughing so much. It definitely made the day a bit better.
From there, we went to the hotel and got some much needed sleep. The next day, we got up bright and early for the subway to catch the bus to reach the airport. As soon as we landed in Orlando, we took a much needed sigh of relief. Long story short, do not go to New York on a day with anticipated heavy rain.