Complex Numbers

Vacation spots

I figure, why not expand on last entry's "25 things," one at a time? This is, after all, the month containing my birthday, so a bit of introspection is, perhaps, forgivable.

1. My favorite vacation spot is Belize. My second favorite is New York City. Go figure that.

This is actually fairly simplistic and possibly misleading. I've been to Belize exactly once and, while we enjoyed it a great deal, we don't have plans to go back just yet.

Though there are islands for sale just off the coast for a remarkably reasonable sum, considering. About what you'd pay for a upper-middle-class house in my town.

If I were upper-middle-class I might even consider it.

Anyway, like I said, I've been to Belize once, but there are two places we go almost every year: New York City (NYC) and North Carolina's Outer Banks (OBX). So really, you could consider OBX my favorite vacation spot, and NYC my favorite place to visit.

The distinction is important. There's virtually no reason to visit OBX except to vacation, while the reasons for visiting NYC are manifold, especially since my wife and I both have relatives there. You may remember I went there - alone - last month. Well, I'm going again - this time with my wife - this month.

The occasion (apart from my birthday) is the first American concert in 15 years for Leonard Cohen.

You might not have heard of Leonard Cohen, but I can almost guarantee that you've heard at least one of his songs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_cohen

I had a bitch of a time getting tickets. Apparently they were sold out prior to the official tickets-on-sale date. Unable to score tickets from the respectable, conventional and price-gouging Ticketmaster site, I turned to the disreputable, unconventional, and oh-my-god-you-want-HOW-much? reseller market.

I won't disclose what I paid for tickets. I will say that I've never paid that much for Bruce tickets. In my defense, Bruce plays huge stadiums and a whole lot more often. There are opportunities of scale. Yes, Bruce is a lot more popular, but Cohen has a devoted core following of fanatics. Wait, so does Bruce. Anyway, the point is, I scored tickets.

Having secured entrance to the exclusive concert, I set about finding transport and lodging. Transportation was a no-brainer; from where I live, it's more expensive to fly than to take the train; the train is a lot more comfortable, though slightly longer from door to door. And no one strip-searches me before getting on the train. So - train it is. Got a decent price for round-trip tickets, and no 3am departure times, either.

I decided to get creative with lodging. Like I said, my wife and I both have family there, but we wanted to be answerable for our time to no one but ourselves, so we wanted to get a hotel room.

Hotel rooms in NYC can be outrageous. More expensive, even, than scalped Leonard Cohen tickets. But this is New York City in February. February is the month people escape NYC, not enter it. So I decided to look for a bargain.

Before I looked for bargains, though, I remembered something about Nikola Tesla; how he spent the last 10 years of his life in a hotel in Manhattan called the New Yorker. Wouldn't it be cool, geek that I am, to stay in the same hotel? What are the odds that one of those early-20th hotels would still be standing, and still functioning as a hotel?

About the same, I guess, as the odds of me getting Leonard Cohen tickets:

http://newyorkerhotel.com/index.html

More, they're running a winter special, and it's costing us less than $150 a night to stay there.

Less than $150 a night, in the middle of midtown New York City, less than a block from the train station.

The optimist in me cheered.

The pessimist figures there's going to be one HELL of a blizzard that week.