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friday night alex wong and i decided that this weekend we'd go down to new york city for the day. sunday morning i woke up at 5am in preparation for the 4 hour road trip. route 90 to 84 to 91 to 95 to 278 across the triboro bridge into manhattan. our trip would be one of the most technologically advanced as i monitored our highway journey via my newly acquired etrex vista gps. the gps was useful in calculating our "distance/time to destination", answering the proverbial question "are we there yet?" down to the seconds and miles. at one point during the trip (during the connecticut stretch) i took over the driving while alex neglected his navigator duty and slept. it was during that period i drove alex's car to 96mph, as documented on the gps in the "max speed" box. we stopped at another rest area so alex can switch and drive into NYC while i got out of the car to use the bathroom. thus began my very special rest stop area bathroom experience! the stall itself was surprisingly clean (i think that's because it's a macdonald restaurant), but when i closed the door i got a bit of a shock: somebody had drawn a massive phallus on the back of the door. it wasn't just a simple drawing, but one of amazingly obscene details, cover the whole region down under. while i sat awaiting my mission to be completed staring at the tribute to male fertility on the backdoor, i had another scare because i thought there wasn't any toilet paper in the dispenser and i had to resort to pleading with strangers from underneath the door to rescue me with a toilet paper supply. luckily that wasn't the case, the paper was just stuck inside. mission completed, i returned to the car and we got back on the highway. when we arrived in manhattan (10am), we went down roosevelt parkway and then across harlem (where clinton works!) to the top of central park. we then drove down fifth avenue along central park down as far as soho before making a detour and driving back up north, where we parked at the cbs studio parking lot ($35/day), walked to time square, and took the subway to chinatown ($1.50/token), canal street station. in chinatown alex bought a bunch of knives and weapons from a martial arts store while i purchased an iron-on decal that says "member of bruce lee kung fu team." who's the bad ass, yeah! we had lunch in a vietnamese restaurant. for those who are curious, NYC pho tastes the same as boston pho. afterwards we walked north on broadway to the strand bookstore, where i bought a few books (from abfab to zen: paper's guide to pop culture and the slang of sin). i was actually hoping to see some famous people after i read in a magazine that michelle williams (i just adore her in dick!)frequents the strand bookstore. no such luck. the place was hot and crowded and with the faint aroma of sweaty ass (it could've been just the old book smell though). from broadway we stopped at union square, where we sat down to rest a little bit. it was there i started to feel exhausted and actually bored in a sensory overload sort of way. everything seemed so interesting, everything was photoworthy, that i ended up not taking that many photos (96 total) because i was too busy just soaking up the experience (this by the way was not my first time in NYC, i've been there before so i am not that much a newbie). we walked back to fifth avenue, where we marched up to 53rd street, stopping ever so often to browse a store or take a few scenic snapshots. by 5pm we made it back to the parking garage, picked up the car, and drove back across the triboro bridge, waving good bye to NYC as we paid the toll and headed back to boston. alex drove the whole way back. he tried to push the car to 100 mph during a straight-away but according to the gps we only went as fast as 99.5mph. another time we narrowly avoided being caught in a speed trap as we saw a cruiser vehicle and quickly decelerated from 80mph to the legal speed limit within a few seconds, our eyes glued to the rear-view mirrors to make sure the cop wasn't following us. in the end, the entire roundway trip was 405 miles (not counting the miles traveled within manhattan, where the numerous tall buildings obstructed clear line of sight for satellite reception hence no gps action), and we spent 6 hours and 29 minutes driving.