Flew in to NYC on Tuesday morning for business. Overheard some conversations about hurricane, but did not pay attention. Tue-Wed - done with business. Wife arriving Thursday - we planned a mini-vacation through Monday.
Move in to friend's place on Thursday and meet wife at the airport. Life is peachy.
Friday we are obliviously exploring the city.
Saturday hurricane becomes the real deal on the news. Try to reschedule her flight for Sunday, but it's impossible - all flights are booked solid. Thought about maybe getting a rental car and driving out of hurricane's reach, then catching a flight, but it was prohibitively expensive.
Sunday starts out rainy. We are on the 14th and 6th. Go check out Hudson a few times, see the water rise. Sunday night rolls in, and I start receiving mandatory evacuation and shelter in place notices on my iPhone (we are not in zone A). We are on the 21st floor, last floor of the building, can see financial center and New Jersey.
Around 11pm our lights go out. We have candles and some food, but turned out, we forgot to think of matches or lighter. I got 21 floors down, lighting the path with my charged phone. Out on the streets its ridiculous - a side gust from a narrow alley lifts me up, and I scramble for the shelter of the next building. All convenience stores are quickly shutting their doors as they lost the power.
As I walk towards the East River a bright white light illuminates the sky with a very specific sound. I heard this sound before - the sound of oil transformers exploding. True enough, it was exactly that, and the blocks I was walking to go out in darkness. Right then my wife calls saying neighbors lent us a lighter. I go back. 21 floors in the pitch darkness, with wind howling outside - quite impressive.
We sit around talking with friend, then go to bed. Morning rolls in, and there's devastation everywhere. We make it all the way to Times Square before finding a place to have breakfast. Then move into another friends' place, where there's a charging party. They have electricity and heat, despite living right on FDR - their basement got completely flooded.
Charge up the phones, and I manage to re-book my wife onto a flight back to SFO out of Hartford, CT. She has to get back ASAP, because we arranged for babysitting with kids (7 and 2) through Monday only... Any day after that is a scramble between in-laws and good friends. I am staying in NYC until Friday. We move across the Central Park to a rental place and get a car. Original plan was to stay another night at my first friend's place and drive my wife to CT in the morning, but as we go up 21 floors back to his place, we discover there's no water any more.
So I book a hotel at Hartford and we drive out. It's a traffic clusterfuck in Lower Manhattan, and having never driven their before - doubly so, but we manage to get out and drive to CT. They gave me a car with half a tank of gas, so I start looking for gas stations before it's too late. Half are without power, others don't have gas. We finally find one midway between CT and NYC, right at the state border line, and it's cash only. We do have cash, so fill up and arrive at Hartford.
Next morning get my wife on the flight and drive back to Manhattan. Tried to drop the car off elsewhere without getting onto the island, but Thrify has no locations outside the city at all. Oh fuck, here we go.
The drive turns out to be uneventful, GW bridge is flowing smoothly, very few cars. Drop the car off and try to get out of Manhattan as fast as I can - I reserved a hotel at the Newark airport, my original departure location. No cabs want to pick me up. Finally get one, and get a ride for $150 cash all the way to the airport hotel. It's a huge ripoff, but trains aren't running, tunnels are closed, the bridges aren't walkable, and I'm not a local to figure out something else. Fine, let this be my biggest loss.
So now I am checked into a Newark hotel, waiting for my Friday flight.
THE END.