Welcome to New York

The ref was counting yesterday but I’m back on my feet.

Don Sherman was most helpful in locating a temporary storage facility in Brooklyn on Craigslist. It’s just over a mile down the hill on the waterfront from where I was born in Sunset Park (Finntown back in those days). How serendipitous is that?

That’s where I was headed yesterday after my visit with Rich Parker of Parker Interior Plantscape. My Mapquest route was through the Holland and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels. See the banner on InsideGreenNYC.

Well, it didn’t happen. I got all the way to the Holland Tunnel entrance. There was a guy on the street peddling bottled water. He asked if I was planning on driving my truck through the tunnel. Duh, well of course I was. He said, “You can’t go through there with a truck. No trucks allowed since 9/11.” He then proceeded to give me directions to the Lincoln tunnel. A most helpful guy he was.

However, this was the start of an episode of The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Think pits of pythons, packs of jackals, pterosaurs flying overhead. The detour route marked by little temporary signs with concrete road barriers everywhere was indescribable.

The result was that I did a couple of tricky u-turns, missed the turn to the Lincoln Tunnel and ended up on the NJ Turnpike heading to the George Washington Bridge. That definitely ain’t the best way to Brooklyn

That when I pulled in to a rest area about 5:30 pm and called the storage place. There was no way I would get there by closing at 7 pm. When I told the guy about crossing Manhattan he said don’t do that, come over the Verrazano Bridge and you’ll land in Brooklyn not far from us.

Duh, who ever thought of getting there by the Verrazano Bridge? So to end this for now, I finally found a Hampton Inn at the same exit I need to go to cross the bridge. The room is bigger than the apartments I’m likely to find in Brooklyn. There’s even a Jacuzzi next to the bed. It looks like the general manager’s suite.

So, it’s on to the waterfront in Sunset Park to see what’s in store for today’s adventure.

It needs to be said that there would be no adventures if not for the professional truck packing job done by Matt Wood. Hell, I didn’t even know how important it was. If he hadn’t done such a superb job of loading the plants on the rack and the racks on the truck I would never have made it this far. I had no idea how many bad roads we have across the country. Some of them shook the hell out of the truck. It’s amazing that everything (so far as I know) stayed intact. We’ve got a lot of infrastructure work to do, that’s for sure.

BFN BB