Jenny said her goodbyes to Shea and met Kelly at Joe’s to find Kel elbow deep in sweaters, shirts, bags, you name it, as she attempted to condense her luggage to mail the majority home. Well, parting with the majority was harder than Kelly had initially planned – the over packer is embedded deep inside of both of us so parting with a single t-shirt feels very difficult. Jenny decided this was a good time to make use of Joe’s kind offer to use his washer and dryer to do some of the laundry that she had been lugging around since Samara, hence the permanent Tica smell that Jenny now had. Laundry had never felt like such a joyous luxury! Kelly’s inner minimalist was able to shine through as she parted with 3 huge boxes of clothing.
The reorganizing of the luggage may be confusing to some of you – keep in mind when we left home we didn’t even have Europe in mind as a destination and had anticipated being in Costa Rica and then teaching at an unknown destination for up to a year. We had packed accordingly and brought every sundress, tank top, summer skirt and pair of shorts around. Adding Europe to the agenda added a slight complication: what would we wear? We are brave but not brave enough to stomp around in flip flops and dresses in freezing cold weather. NYC was decided as our layover and we planned to have warm clothes sent to us in exchange for our excess of summery items which we would send home (Jenny with the help of Shea and Kelly with the help of the post office).
Okay, now that we got that cleared up…back to our very exciting packing story! Joe came home from work early, we think more as an excuse for the rest of the day off than because we actually needed his help :) but we were very grateful nonetheless. Getting Kelly’s belongings to the post office, about 7 blocks away, was harder than we had initially anticipated. Joe packed her boxes inside of huge suitcases he had in his apartment so that we could get everything down the bustling NYC streets. After a stressful walk with every awkward box hitting the concrete at least twice, we arrived at the Post Office. This should be a quick and easy job we thought….uh, wrong! Have you ever been to Kinkos for a copy and everyone there seems to have never operated a printer before, let alone heard of a copy? Well this was kind of like that, except every employee was totally ridiculous and right out of an SNL skit. We looked everywhere for Ashton but are pretty sure that we weren’t being punked. First we had the wrong box…then the wrong tape…then the box had the wrong writing on it so we had to cover it up…but we used the wrong tape to do that…after taping and un-taping and re-taping what seemed like 100 times we finally had it right. But then it was wrong again so we had to buy bubble wrap, and wrap the box up in it, and put it in another box and tape that box too. This was overall a totally absurd experience and we never want to do so much as mail a letter ever again. The three of us were cracking up throughout which made the already un-amused post office staff even less amused. We left the post office after about an hour, fingers crossed that Kelly’s things would make it home. Who knew the post was such a complicated endeavor?!
Joe treated us to sushi, along with Melinda, after the post office fiasco. We were fully packed and wanted to leave plenty of time to get to the airport for our 10pm flight so we headed to dinner around 5:30. Planet Sushi was a weird place, but not as weird as the fish collar bone that Melinda ordered and insisted that we try. It actually wasn’t bad, although watching her peel the fins away from this giant fish bone brought back some pretty gross images of the giant teethed fish heads we discovered on our beach walks in Samara. After we were totally stuffed, with collar bone and every sushi roll we could order (Joe is a phenomenal guy to go to a restaurant with) we couldn’t image eating another bite. Until we walked outside and spotted Crumbs cupcakery and decided we needed 2 for the road. We bought Joe and Melinda one also - they needed a little convincing as they were starting an organic juice cleanse the following day…well, Melinda needed convincing, not so much Joe. Once we made our extremely important cupcake decisions we were ready to head to the airport.
We grabbed our bags (one each! A huge victory for us!) and headed down to the street to get in our car to the airport. We all exchanged hugs and we said our goodbyes to Joe and Melinda – literally thanking Joe until he told us both to shut up.
A million thanks to the lady at JFK who let us check our bags after wordlessly resetting the scales so they weighed in at 50lbs. We loved having so much time at the airport as it was our final goodbye to our phone service, and our time to savor our delicious cupcakes! Boarding our Virgin Atlantic flight felt like a flash back to flying in the 70’s with the well dressed and very cheerful flight attendants, and brightly colored carpets and seats...the difference would be the addition of tons of great on-flight movies on the personal screens. We settled in for a long flight and a short night of sleep. Even though we weren’t able to sit together for the next 7 hours (bummer), Virgin was pretty awesome… we might try to make use of the bars on the plane next time around...
Going Postal
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