Ikea Daze

Dear readers, you will be interested to learn that this weekend...Hell froze over.  In the figurative sense that is.  I was chatting with Mike on Saturday when he suddenly said, and I quote, "Hey - do you think we should make a trip to Ikea tomorrow?"  Shocking!  Mike generally HATES anything that has to do with shopping, much less the low-cost Swedish cow herding type found at Ikea.  Unsure of the situation, I merely replied "sure" and we went about our business as usual. 

On Sunday morning, I tested the waters with a cautious "so...do you still want to go to Ikea?"  And the answers my friends, was YES.  Unfortunately, the happy people down at the Metropolitan Transit Authority have taken it upon themselves to make our lives as miserable as possible and, in an effort to make the B-61 bus run more efficiently, they decided to split the bus route in two.  This means, that we are no longer able to just hop on a bus a couple of blocks from our apartment and ride it patiently for a half hour before arriving at our local Swedish marketplace.  Instead, we had to hop on the B-62 a couple of blocks from our apartment, and sit there patiently for 1 HOUR while it made stops at every frigging half block from Williamsburg to downtown Brooklyn, only to go as far as Fulton Mall.  At that point we had to run across the street to just miss the departing B-61.  And, since the fulton stop is the end of line for that one, when the next bus arrived we had to wait while the bus driver went on break before being allowed to board the bus.  The end result was  that it took us nearly 2 hours to travel 8 miles. 

On the way back, our bellies full of synthetic meatball product and $1 frozen yogurt cones, we had  the brilliant idea to instead just take the water taxi to manhattan and catch the J train from there.  Needless to say, it was soooo much better. 



Here's a picture of Mike and I, so happy to be sitting on a boat in the warm sunshine when we could easily be crammed into a hot, crowded bus that smells like popeye's chicken and exhaust fumes.

We were early to arrive in the taxi queue, so we were able to snag the coveted way-back.

 This is an uninteresting picture of some building near the Navy Yard.  I only posted it because you can see a few of the old Subway cars parked out front.  Its funny how much they resemble old Airstream trailers.

The back view of the taxi.  It never fails to amuse me that you can get to Ikea by boat.

And breezy too, and the sailboats were out in full force in the harbor.  Helicopters too.  We saw about 6 of them land or take off at the heliport just in the time it took to cross the river.

A parting shot - I like to point my camera phone directly at the sun. It often confuses it into thinking it is night-time and it ends up taking these lovely moonlit shots.