The Shit Show, New York style

        “In all my travels, I’ve never been diverted to different airport due to bad weather.”

        And that’s saying something. Vicki, my ex-wife and good friend, loves to travel, and she’s traveled a lot. She's been to Paris, London, even Russia. It seems like she’s always jetting off to some exotic new place. So when I texted Vicki that I had had landed in Philadelphia, 80 miles away from our scheduled destination in Newark, she provided my first inkling that my trip to New York was going to be a shit show—wall to wall, terminal by terminal, step by step.

        “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s never happened to me.”

      She didn’t owe me an apology, but it was still nice to hear it. It's not her fault. Vicki had planned to join our son, Chris, and his girlfriend for an extended stay in New York City. But when Vicki was grounded due to unexpected health issues, I agreed to take her place, even though I knew from past trips that New York was as far outside my comfort zone as anyplace on the planet. But I stepped up (attaboy!) when I learned that the trip would not happen for our granddaughter, Paige, who needed a chaperone during the week when her dad was working during the day.

        The irony of me following an itinerary Vicki planned for herself was not lost on either of us. When we were married, our vacations were sometimes stressful due to our different priorities and personal styles. For her, vacations were action-packed excursions to every noteworthy site within a 30- or 40-mile radius. Me, I need more downtime and reading in a different state was reason enough to be there. 

        In lighter moments, we joked that I'm like Macon Leary, the main character in Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist,” who writes travel guides for those who want to feel at home in even the most exotic locales. (His guidebooks will help you find Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan or canned Chef Boyardee pasta in Rome.) That's definitely me. When traveling, I crave the convenience and familiarity of my home in Salt Lake City, Utah. And it’s not because I’m a Mormon; I'm not. But I’ve lived in Utah all my life and wouldn't live anywhere else. Thanks to the easy-to-follow grid system laid out by Brigham Young and Mormon pioneers, it's nearly impossible to get lost. For example, my favorite coffee shop, Salt Lake Roasting Company, is located at 820 East and 400 South, which means I am eight blocks east and four blocks south of the Salt Lake LDS temple. The grid system may sound extremely unimaginative, boring even. But once you understand—and accept—that Mormons are at the center of everything, you will always know where you are and where you’re going. Perfect for a guy with a famously blinkered sense of direction.

       So yes: I'm a Utahn through and through. Still, New York is not always a complete waste of time. Despite its gargantuan girth and maze of rhymeless streets, New York still has a lot to offer. I love the theater, which is world class. I love the food. And I love people watching. New Yorkers are striking. They look like they just walked off a movie set—stylish clothes (generally black for some reason; lots of leather), buff bodies, and hair immaculately coiffed in ways that often seem to defy gravity. 

        With that in mind, I found a couple plays that sounded interesting—one called “Appropriate,” another a reimagining of Ibsen's “An Enemy of the People.” I figured that adding these shows to Vicki's itinerary would make my trip more tolerable. But I didn’t factor in the difficulties I would have getting to downtown theaters. I would soon learn that the subways were baffling and sometimes excruciating due to my age and physical limitations. So, the fact that Paige and I were diverting to Philadelphia was a foretaste of the many misadventures in store for me over the next 10 days.