Trip 5: Day 1

Flying into and out of unfamiliar airports is always a bit of a treat for me because you get to see how the typical airport things, like security and crowd management are handled, but also how those cities and their airports self-promote from within.

Monterey Regional Airport (MRY) consists of one terminal building and five gates. There's not much to look at. In spite of a 5:22am scheduled departure time, the airline counter did not open until 4am and security did not open until 4:30, creating an enormous line of mostly people who ended up getting on later flights. I know they were on later flights because my 5:22am flight ended up departing at 7:15am.

Luckily, there was another SFO-JFK non-stop departing just about 90 minutes after the flight on which I had previously been ticketed, so the "maintenance delay" (seems like a misnomer there, since "maintenance" is typically scheduled and managed and, therefore, would not create a delay) didn't have to stop me from getting to New York before dark.

But it almost did. SFO's United Airlines section has been split into two terminals, with the United Express flights mostly going in to Terminal 1, while the larger planes are in Terminal 3. SFO does not have a way to make an inter-terminal transfer that allows one to remain in security; they just a little bus that drives across the tarmac with a Filipina woman spouting off instructions to business travelers and families who cannot understand or are not listening. Between yet another delay in take-off and an unwanted aerial tour of San Francisco, I had about 15 minutes before my gate closed for the flight to JFK. As I passed out of the doors to board the shuttle bus, I saw someone signal their hand across their throat, telling another person to cut off the line at me. I heard someone yell "Why? Why?" behind me. I didn't look back.
Once at Terminal 3, I pushed my way through a few people to get off of the bus, then sprinted to my gate, which was quite a ways from the shuttle drop-off. As I got to Gate 67, the agent was mouthing off "Final boarding" into the PA. Just made it.

Frozen Lake Erie

Once on, I found that I had been given "Economy Plus," which entails more legroom, a personal entertainment center (I watched fifteen minutes of the self-indulgent "This Is The End," and half of "Anchorman" without sound), and an electrical outlet. Missing the first flight came with a nice bonus on the second. Next to me was a nice, older Jewish couple who chatted with me briefly about California. I was able to doze a bit, making the 2am wake-up a bit easier to deal with.

Map of flight path from the in-seat monitor

View from my hotel. The looming building in the foreground
is the Port Authority Bus Terminal, across the street

Ironically, the flight path almost exclusively followed the route of US 6, always just a little to the north, allowing me, on the south-facing side of the plane, to see where I'll be over the next two months. It looked pretty cold. Lake Erie was completely frozen over, and you could see the last specks of melting snow in Warren, PA. The Rockies, of course, were also snow-bound.



Arriving in New York involved taking the AirTrain to the subway. You have two choices there: Jamaica or Howard Beach. I chose Howard Beach, and ended up on an express train that didn't get crowded until just before we crossed the East River, so I had a seat the whole way. Uneventful ride, though the train smelled like some sort of poor human hygiene smell that had been covered by cleansing agent.

The rest of the evening, I drank at the hotel bar to chat with the bartender and get some ideas on what to do. She was a native New Yorker, though I immediately identified a slight Polish accent, and she admitted that she was from a family of Polish immigrants. I got some ideas on places to go in Brooklyn (I've never been) and an outdoor market in the East Village. Then I walked, ate street food (a slice, a samosa, and a hot dog with fries for ~$5) and drank at another bar, The Ginger Man.
Now I chose The Ginger Man because, one, it's close to my hotel, but also I was curious if it was in any way related to the bar of the same name in Houston. And it is. I guess the original owner of the one in Houston sold the name years ago, but opened this one and still maintains it.
They had a good beer selection, and able to try several new breweries: Greenport, Bronx, Captain Lawrence and Newburgh. Captain Lawrence made the bar's house beer, which was a flat and gross gingerbread-tasting ale while my favorite on that list was the Bronx, which was a "black pale."

The fact is that much of the Northeast is a bit behind on the beer craze. For the size of the population in the region, the number of breweries is fairly small, and many have only opened in the last five years. When I first came through in 2007, consciously looking for local breweries, they were really few and far between. What I did find was mostly poor quality places, designed more as brewpubs and focused on the food with the house beer as just a novelty. And most of these places I found then still exist today unchanged. Maybe the Northeast is ahead of the curve: seeing that much of this is an unsustainable fad and that they can just ride the wave of others who have over-expanded. The Ginger Man, on that note, had mostly California and Colorado breweries on tap.