A Suburban Adventure

This one's totally unrelated to food....

Given my four day weekend, I was itching for some kind of adventure, there were enough days to lay around and enjoy being off work, but if I had too much time I knew I would either bake (and we already have four tupperwares filled with oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate peanut butter chip cookies, and brownies, plus the pudding ice cream), or organize and re-organize the apartment.

We had been throwing around the idea of going to Target for weeks now, and brought it up again while at brunch with our friends on Saturday. they only offered us many words of encouragement, "you should totally rent a car" and "Target!?! yes!" (I may be paraphrasing, but that's pretty close). Jeff looked for cars for Saturday afternoon (at 12:30 on Saturday), but unsurprisingly, none were available. so we kind of dropped it, said we'd look again, but forgot by the time we got home.

Sunday morning I got a reminder email from one of my friends, so Jeff looked online again. there was ONE car available in the whole city and the only time it was available was from 2 - 6 pm. PERFECT. and it was a MINI COOPER! I immediately asked if it were a convertible, sadly no, but the sunroof was essentially the whole top of the car.

one afternoon trip to target in a mini coming up!

next came me AGONIZING over which target to go to. there are several in NJ, one in Queens and then bunches out further in Long Island. I had been to one in LI with a friend awhile back and it was fantastic, so I wanted to go there to make sure we had a good target experience, but it was a 45 minute drive, and we didn't want to have to rush at target if there was traffic. see the thing is, you want the target to be far enough outside the city so that its the suburbs (and you get the full suburban target experience) but not too far that it takes forever to get there. a fine line, a very fine line. so we decided on one in NJ.

there was a little apprehension over the size of the trunk, given that we were going to target and all, and the whole point is to buy everything, but I heard that the trunk is really bigger than you think it is, and with a leap of faith we piled into the car (three of us total).

rarin' to go, Jeff turns the key in the ignition, nothing. but all the lights go on in the car. it doesn't turn over, it doesn't try to turn over, but the air comes on, all the lights go on, everything except the engine. so it's not the battery, it seemed as though it was disengaged. could our target hopes come crashing down? I hoped not. Jeff was sure we were "being stupid" but got out and asked the parking attendant, who gently reminded Jeff he had to swipe his zip car card on the inside of the car to engage it. oh RIGHT! (actually, I had no idea you had to do this, but now we'll never forget). with only a few minutes lost, we set out for the suburbs.

we head out for the open highway (well, the very traffic-y west side highway) and headed to the tunnel. Also happening this weekend is Fleet Week in which Navy ships come into the piers in mid-town and you can check them out and there are sailors and such wandering around. anyway, the ships are close to the tunnel, so there's lots of people and LOTS of policemen.

having not often driven out of the city, we didn't exactly know the route, and we fell back into our normal routine where Jeff drives fast and I can't tell him where to go and then I yell that he did the wrong thing. aah, the suburbs. anyway, he ended up in the wrong lane, "wrong" because we needed to turn left to go to the tunnel and he couldn't get into the left lane because there were orange cones set up (set up with plenty of space between them so that a car, especially a mini could go between them). I said, "go through the cones" Jeff said "I can't, and there is a police man RIGHT there" (literally 15 feet in front of us). But, Jeff does it anyway.

cop looks up, and immediately starts walking to the car. he does not look happy.
"What are you doing? You want a ticket on Memorial Day? You saw me standing there and the cones, what are you doing disrespecting my cones? You're disrespecting me and my cones. The only reason I can think you did that was because you want a ticket on Memorial Day."
he took a breath and Jeff said
"No, but I can see why you think that. I'm sorry"
and he replied
"Get out of my lane!"

we got through the light and by the cop and all three of us immediately started laughing "disrespecting my cones" - did he seriously just say that?! but I would have been in HUGE trouble if Jeff would have gotten a ticket. however, it was very clear that he wasn't giving Jeff a ticket from the beginning, because he just would have asked for license and registration. but we were through the traffic, through the cop and his cones and on our way.

when we got to our exit and got off the highway, the area seemed, well, not what I had hoped for. I became very nervous that the target would not be everything that I had been imagining. but we made it inside, and it definitely met my expectations. we filled up a cart (literally filled up to the top), and headed to the checkout. we then began to worry about fitting it all in the car (especially since Jeff insisted we buy a mop). we took the cart out and just started piling the bags in, one on top of another, we kept piling until we had two bags left, which probably could have fit in the trunk too, but we had extra space in the back, so we through them back there. the mop, of course had to slide in the back and through the front two seats. but, it was pretty amazing, I'd have to say.

we headed back into the city munching on Goldfish crackers, happy suburbanites for a couple of hours.