THE WEEK THAT WAS PART 1: THE WEEK THAT WAS #1 OF 2 OR 3 I DON'T KNOW YET WE'LL SEE

I'm back from my trip to New York City, and I'm still alive. I'm also wiser, taller, my hair is longer, my pants dirtier, I'm smoother, I'm not tanned and my clothes smell like garbage!

The trip was a great success. If you didn't know before, the original reason we went was to see a couple of New York area Toronto Maple Leaf hockey matches, but then we booked a comedy show and a bunch of our friends came toward the end oh yah.

Now strap on you best bra, slice up some pears and allow me to whisk you away to Memory Road at Cool Times Street in the Vacation District of my brain, and enjoy part one of the New York February 2009 Toronto Maple Leaf Comedy Show Road Trip (with select pictures).

DAY 1 - Driving to New York and getting to New York

We drove a Subaru Impreza car to the state of New York, and in it were myself, this guy named Stein and this guy named Andy. We were relying on my dad's GPS navigator so confidence was high and so was excitement because road trips with dudes are big in a man's life. Things hit a snag when Andy dropped the GPS and somehow managed to turn down the volume on the female voice who was guiding us, thus when we reached an important step along the way, we didn't hear the lady and missed an exit and so it plotted us a new course based on our mistake. Instead of driving across New York State, our new course was to head south through Pennsylvania and New Jersey and into NYC. It turned out this wasn't so bad because along the way we found one of these in a tiny town named 'Homer' I think:

If you're stupid you'll need me to tell you that this is an old time A&W drive through where the town babes work and bring your hamburgers to your car. After a solid round of root beers and aforementioned hamburgers, we embarked once more, passing several other towns with funny names such as:
AHAHAHAHA "PORTLAND" ahahahahahah.

Just kidding, it says "Buttzville". That's the funniest thing 100%.

We reached our destination of Yonkers where we were to park our car in front of our friend Sarah's house for the week after driving through the top part of Manhattan, across the George Washington Bridge which shook up driver Stein a touch. What a baby. What a stupid baby.

We were greeted by Sarah and her roommates with a spaghetti dinner and some cans of beer. They wanted to take us into the city that night to party hard, which I was weary about because I quite simply wanted to go to bed after a 9 hour car ride and running on 4 hours of sleep (I had to watch the last Conan the night before). But you can never stop a party, and wasn't about to try so away we went on a train to the city to this bar called "The Continental" who boasts a deal of 5 shots for 10 dollars.

After several shots and a couple of brews, I called it quits and got real tired real fast, although my companions were more than willing to keep the party alive until the bar closed at 4. So I sat there half dead for a couple of hours until we left and I slept poorly in Yonkers on an air mattress.

DAY 2 - Movin' In and New York Rangers

We went to Manhattan the next day to meet up with our other friend Sarah who was going to let us into her boyfriend's apartment where we were to stay the whole week. We also met up with Vince who was our 4th companion and who flew in that day. After waiting in the rain for half an hour outside the place on Lafayaette Street in the Nolita region, Sarah showed up and let us into this place:

It was cozy, but it did the job. Like a cave that a bear sleeps in, you know? It ain't the Ritz, but a guy can sleep in it for sure. There was no way to control the heat and most of the time it was freezing, so just like a bear, you grow more fur, or in this case, just put on more shirts.

Then we went here to a Rangers/Leafs game at Madison Square Garden and we got to see two numbers being retired in a very long, but touching ceremony. Fans in New York are big time serious and we couldn't cheer for the Leafs without getting heckled real bad by the die hard fans. This one old guy seriously wanted to fight us just because we were happy the Leafs scored.

Following the game we went to a bar where our friend Phil tends bar. After everyone in the bar left we got wild:

We left at 4:30 and woke up our neighbour trying to open the door to the apartment.

That's all for today, I'm sick of recapping. I'm not going to go into as much detail from now on unless you really want me to. I'm going to concentrate on quality not quantity for the next couple of recaps. Sound good? GOOD.