East Coast Trip: SLC to NYC

8 September 1985

First I started out with photo albums.  Then I progressed to trip-specific photo albums.  And then I progressed to trip-specific photo albums with trip journals.  I don’t think I did this for all of our trips, but I sure did it for this one.  And yes, I am going to take advantage of all those notes.  You bet I am!

We were so naive.  When we started planning our 2½-week trip, our itinerary stretched from Montreal, Canada in the north to Florida in the south.  I guess it all looked close enough on the map.  Luckily, we wised up quickly and rearranged our itinerary to cover Washington DC (including northern Virginia), and bits and pieces of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts.

Let me start at the beginning … from when we boarded our Western Airlines flight from Salt Lake City to New York City.  Actually, let me go back a little earlier in the day to when Carol, a friend of ours, came by to pick us up from our place in Kaysville.  She didn’t find us patiently waiting by the door; she found us putting the last coat of stain on our redwood lawn furniture!  But fear not.  Our bags were already packed, and it took us just a few minutes to wrap up our project, change our clothes, and walk out the door.

We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare before our 6:45p departure.  Once we were aboard the plane, we found it only a quarter full, so we each took three seats to ourselves, hoping to catch a couple of winks before we landed at JFK around midnight.  No sooner were we wheels up that they started feeding us.  The food wasn’t half-bad considering it was airline food.  It was an uneventful flight with just a bit of turbulence as we crossed over Iowa.  A spectacular lightning show almost — but not quite — made up for the discomfort of the turbulence.

Thanks to tail winds, our flight landed at JFK 3¼ hours after it took off from SLC.  It took the aircraft another 15-20 minutes to reach the gate.  By the time we had collected our bags and called the car rental agency for pick-up it was long past midnight.  We were way too tired to drive any significant distance, so we decided to overnight at one of the airport hotels.

Boy can we pick ‘em or what!  After perusing our AAA guide, we settled on the Kennedy Airport Inn.  We figured that for $60/night it had to be a reasonably nice hotel, right?  WRONG!  The place was a dump!  And the dim light from the one lamp in the room didn’t help matters at all.  Or maybe it did.  Maybe we would have left running had we really been able to see what was hidden by the weak light.

After deliberating for a couple of minutes, we decided to stay the night … we were practically asleep on our feet, and sticky and irritable from the humidity.  We were simply in no shape to go looking for another hotel.  Keeping our travel clothes on, we covered the pillows with a couple of t-shirts and fell into bed.  It was instant lights out.

Our mood wasn’t much improved when we woke up the next morning.  The dreary weather outside the grimy windows made our room feel even more depressing and we couldn’t wait to get on the road.  By 9:30a, we were in our ‘85 Dodge Aries rental, putting as much distance between the hotel and ourselves as the heavy traffic would allow.

Hence we began the first leg of our vacation … onward to DC.