Weekend Blitz

54 Hours in New York

We took a short, weekend-getaway-style trip to New York.

When I say short, I genuinely mean it. Total time gone was 54 hours: 27 hours spent in the city and 27 hours spent on a train going to/from.

TRIP PLANNING:

I had been checking the cheapest/best way to get from Charleston, SC to New York off and on for the past week. Flights were around $450-500 Round Trip with one stop (in Atlanta or Charlotte), or $600+ for the non-stop into Newark or LaGuardia! A lot more than I wanted to spend. Even the trusty Spirit Air flight from Myrtle Beach into LaGuardia was close to $400 round-trip; couple that with the fact that the 6:30pm flight on [...]

In an interesting conflict of interest, I received an upgrade for which I had mixed feelings of “this is awesome, finally!” and “damnit Delta, why are you trying screw me?!” Delta (generally) has a policy of either upgrading all parties in a reservation or none. For example, if you’re a Gold Medallion traveling with a no-status “civilian,” the weakest link in the reservation will decide your position on the upgrade list. Examples:

Easy enough, right? Rule of thumb: Delta uses a “weakest link” scenario when it comes to [...]

1235 Rue Guy, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Thai $$$ – Entrees for 15 – 20 CAD

Ready for a change after consuming several heavy French meals in a row, we looked (again, on Urbanspoon) for a great Thai restaurant. We found one in the Concordia University area, a place with plenty of nightlife around to check out after our meal. Easy subway access, but we, of course, chose to ride our rental bikes.

The restaurant, Phayathai, is on the second story and holds seating for approximately 30 people—pretty small and, again, we’re pretty sure we saw the owner busing tables. There were a few round tables that seat six, but, to be safe, you should probably make a [...]

351 Rue St-Paul Ouest, Montreal, QC Bakery w/ Sandwiches $ to $$ — About CAD 9 – 11 for lunch

After the walking tour, we remained in Vieux Montreal and explored Rue St. Paul. Vieux Montreal, as we learned on our walking tour, is mostly inhabited by tourists. The main street, Rue St. Paul, is lined with restaurants and souvenir shops, and dotted in between is the typical crowd pleaser painted up in gold and throwing gold beads to the crowd–leave it to the Canadians and misinformed college freshmen that body paint is cool.

Love the sign, so typical of Quebec on many levels: [...]

Saturday morning, we were hunting around online to figure out what to do. We had heard great things about Fitz & Follwell Co. bike tours (TripAdvisor), but they didn’t appear to handle last minute reservations very well online and the 4-hour bike tour of the whole city left at 10 a.m. from the Plateau Royal district – the opposite side of town from us. Instead, we discovered that Guidatour (http://www.guidatour.qc.ca/) offers walking tours of Vieux Montreal daily during the summer, departing from Notre Dame (luckily, 5 minutes away from us).

Guidatour review: Tickets are about $20/person for a 90 min tour, which includes a brief visit into Notre Dame. Our tour [...]

We woke up early Sunday to be at the Roraima offices/Residence Inn hotel by 7:15am–the departure point for the tour. Meanwhile, the vans were out collecting our fellow tour-goers from the other Roraima property: Duke Lodge. Transport appeared to be free if you’re staying at one of their properties. To everyone else, including us, you get a giant “screw you” and are told to arrange your own transportation. No big deal, though.

By 8am, all 12 of us were there and we piled onto a bus and started on our 48 min ride to the dock.

Arriving to the dock around 9am, the sun was still rising, the air crisp, fresh and cool with a perfectly still and calm [...]

With 5 minutes left to go on the flight, the pilots had made the descent and we were nearing the Falls. Having done this a time or 2, they came in at a great angle to view the Falls over the left wing then circled to give the right side some love. It’s a pretty awesome vantage point–I mean, I was super tempted to go on the grueling 5-day hike over land but this view really solidified my decision to take the lazy way out.

We circle around and the plane entered the traffic pattern as we set our sites on the runway (which, to my surprise, was paved).

Looks like the 1st flight made it safely:

Our plane was a little dated, but she [...]

Small planes scare many people in the US where we have fairly strict regulation of both aircraft and airspace. It can be assumed that, in non-developed nations, these things fall to the back burner and Guyana is no exception – although it is improving.

Thus, it was important to us to pick a tour operator that had an aircraft that would take us further than the scene of the crash. When researching from afar, it’s hard to know exactly what you’re dealing with, so hopefully our experience can help.

Out of all the flight operators, Air Services Limited has one of the more impressive websites showing off their fleet and large crew, [...]

Here’s something you need to know: the difference between tour agents and tour operators.

Guyana is no stranger to the tourism agency. Although, compared to other countries, it has a long way to go tourism-wise, there are still plenty of Guyanese trying to get a piece of those highly valued $, £, and €. So, to state what shouldn’t need to be said for the sake of being thorough:

Plattsburgh (PBG) airport is served by three carriers–all considered to be “low-cost carriers”:

Alright, so you bit the bullet on the dirt cheap tickets on Spirit Air to head to Montreal but didn’t exactly think that, no matter what the liars at Spirit say, it isn’t like Plattsburgh is a suburb of Montreal — it’s fricken’ 70 miles away — a solid 90 mins.

View Larger Map

So, the getting there is a very important part of your travel [...]