Its hard to write a post about your vacation – call it part one and the never follow up with anything else. It’s like waiting for additional Star Wars movies that we don’t really need anymore to come out. Actually, wait, its like the complete opposite of that… My grasp of analogies is on par with Alanis’s grasp of irony (and…I’ve lost my train of thought).
The point is that I had a wonderful vacation that now seems like it happened eight years ago but involved a lot more than a museum related nervous breakdown. In addition to sweating our proverbial balls off in NYC we also took a side trip, weekend getaway, to the Poconos to a little town called Jim Thorpe that was so anti NYC there was literally nothing to do there. We checked into our quaint, turn of the century Inn with a room so small we couldn’t open the door all the way, we stopped for a bloody mary and walked the entire length of the town in the ten minute time span it took us to decide where to eat lunch. It was perfect.
In NYC we had felt compelled to do everything, see everything that we were so tired and exhausted we barely made it to 10:00pm, in Jim Thorpe were awake until 2:00am – sneaking out onto the balcony (closed at 9:00 – like everything else in the town) to drink cocktails in the cool night air and listen to far off fireworks.
Our second day there, having already wondered in to every store of interest we had breakfast and discussed what to do. He wanted to wander the town and take some pictures, I wanted ice cream and to tour the old jail. I might not like museums but I am fascinated by old prisons. Is that weird? Who knows. My BFF was slightly weary of me at this point and did point out several times that if we went to the jail we would be on a guided tour – with a tour guide, like where you would have to pay attention and stay with a group. I assured him that on my particular chart of crazy the X axis of my museum fear and the Y access of my fear of forced social interaction would not cross paths on this specific outing.
We spent several hours walking around trying to capture the beauty of the Poconos on our cameras, we bought large sugar cones full of ice cream and when it finally opened at noon we were one of the first tourists in line at the old jail. The tour itself was guided my a monotone liberal arts intern who had memorized her speech so robotically that the few questions she asked and the one joke she tried to make were completely lost on her audience. I loved it, it was awful and scary and reminded me fondly of my time touring Eastern State Penitentiary. I wandered round touching rusty locks and peering in tiny peep hole windows, wondering what Piper Chapman would have made of all of this, I bought a T-shirt on my way out through the gift store. It wasn’t until we were outside that I looked at my BFF, white as a sheet, breathing heavily, that I realized maybe we both didn’t enjoy it as much as I had thought.
Apparently, though we share a collective brain his reaction to old, damp, mold infested dilapidated prisons is the same sort of reaction I have to Modern Art – he’s just better at not making a public spectacle of himself. I admire his restraint I really really do.
Sticky Jam Hands 