Last week I broke the tin opener.  It fell into five separate parts while opening a tin of tuna.  Then the hoover went bang.  Literally.  Hetty’s motor joined the big clean up party in the sky.  RIP Hetty.

At that point I should have broken a match like Dad used to do in place of a third breakage.  Maybe if I’d done that we wouldn’t have had the fun and games we had early the next morning.  We got up at 4am, drove to Heathrow and boarded a plane for New York.  Mr R was all ready to run the marathon and we were both ready for some city exploring.  We boarded, we taxi’ed, we stopped.  The speedometer (or some such inconsequential bit of plane kit) was broken.  We went back to our stand and presumably some engineers did a fair bit of head shaking and went to work.  They didn’t take us off the plane as it ‘might only take an hour or so’.  It didn’t.  To cut a long story short, it took 5 hours.  And in that time we were served our lunch and (almost) all the alcohol on board.  But – joy of joys – they did fix it, and even though it meant we spent 13 hours on that blimmin’ plane, it didn’t break mid flight and we did get to New York; just a little later than anticipated.

And it was blimmin’ amazing.

We stayed in Queens which was …an experience: huge men with huge gold chains sitting on huge booming speakers, smoking huge quantities of weed outside all the grocery stores regardless of the time of day.  I felt like I should walk in time to the beat with a bit of a swagger.  I considered buying gold hoop earrings.  Hell, I felt like I was in a Neneh Cherry video 😂 (🎶’New York, just like I pictured it; sky scrapers and everything!  Do do do do do do doooh’🎶 ***).  I loved it.  And the view was one you would never be able to get in a fancy Manhattan hotel:

So we got there (eventually).

We did all the things and more.

We walked around 12 miles a day (even when we tried not to so that Mr R could rest his legs).

We discovered that the New York subway is a law unto itself and while I have no sense of direction, Mr R does.  Yet we still mostly ended up on the wrong trains or going in the wrong direction.

I met SO many dogs (about half were wearing Crocs.  I was unsure how I felt about this).

I talked to more New York Policemen in that time that I think I ever have spoken to English ones.  They were all very nice except one who was a bit of an arse.

We accidentally joined the New York Halloween Parade, but thanks to a couple of my NYPD mates managed to get the right side of the barriers again.

We discovered that the New York Halloween Parade contains many, many amazing costumes (well, we assume it did based on the ones we saw.  We went as Pumpkin Pog and Bony Tony – no costumes needed), but it was so dangerously overcrowded that we decided it just wasn’t worth the risk (another NYPD mate told me they’s never seen it like that and were going to start filtering people out rather than letting ones trying to join in), so we went back to Neneh Cherry land and grabbed a pizza on the way.

Himself ran the marathon in 2 hours 54 minutes and 58 seconds.  That made him 57th out of 3453 in the 50-54 age group. He’s speedy.

I was the only one of us who came home with blisters.

So I might not have broken the match stick and we might have had a rather long time on that plane on the way out but it was worth it – we had such a good time 😁

*** Btw, if you recognised those Neneh Cherry lyrics, 1) I am proud of you and 2) I played the track to my stepson before we went so he could properly imagine me singing my way around. ‘How old is this?  Like, 40 years?’  He asked.  I laughed at his daftness – it was from my youth – hardly that old.  38 years.  It is 38 years old.  Fuck a duck.