November in NYC

H&M sweater (similar)
Zara skirt (similar)
Sezane boots
Massimo Dutti handbag (similar)
RayBan sunglasses
Linjer rings (c/o)
Urban Outfitters earrings
Location: United States Realty Building – New York City, New York

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, anymore. I know that I logged in to Expedia one afternoon in July to verify a change made to our flight to Athens. Hours later, as I was shutting my work laptop down for the day and closing each of the approximately forty open tabs one at a time, I landed on one I didn’t expect: a pop-up from Kayak, advertising hotels in New York in November. The prices looked so good that it gave me pause. Too good to be true, almost.

I closed the tab and shut down. While I had a bit of vacation time left for the year, Ian didn’t, so it was essentially a moot point. No matter how good the deal was, we couldn’t go to New York in November.

The problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When we decided to move back to Winnipeg, we agreed one of the less practical perks would be increased proximity to New York, a city we both love. But in our first two years in Winnipeg, we got nowhere near the city apart from a single press trip in 2017, wherein I spent approximately 24 hours in the city. Ian didn’t get to join on that one. And the reality is, a perk is really only a perk if you can actually take advantage of it. In a matter of days, I became obsessed. We needed to go to New York, I was sure of it. We needed to make good on this pact we’d made with ourselves to visit more often once we lived closer.

All of this coincided with Ian changing jobs. At the time, it seemed meant to be – he was able to tell his new boss that we were already booked for New York, and that was that. (The new job proved to be an ill-advised misadventure that lasted only a few brief months. It ended just after we got back from the city. But the story goes on happily, because he moved on to something much better immediately afterwards.) We booked the trip hastily, unable to believe our good luck.

Honestly, I still almost can’t believe our good luck. We flew to New York for five days in November for less than it would have cost to fly to the nearest Canadian city. I don’t really have to point out that that city pales in comparison to NYC, anyway. We had five days to spend running around in unseasonably warm weather for November, shopping and eating our way through Manhattan – with a stop in Brooklyn for our favourite pizza at Juliana.

New York, as always, proved totally exhausting and occasionally infuriating. Ian loves it enough to never leave, but after five days there, I find myself so dead tired that I am ready to head home. (That is, admittedly a rare thing for me.) The reality is, I was probably so tired because we managed to do everything on our NYC to-do list in those five days. There was no restaurant we missed, no shop we didn’t get to, no sight we didn’t see. Yes, I came home tired. But I have no regrets.

One of the things I often lament about living in North America is how much harder it is to take long weekend trips here. The few low-cost airlines available in Canada fly almost nowhere desirable. (Hamilton and Abbotsford, both capitals of pure distilled excitement, are among their top destinations.) And the allegedly low-cost of their tickets comes with so many strings attached and additional fees to pay that using them is hardly worthwhile, anyway. The lack of competition in hotels means that there is no variation in price to stay anywhere in Canada, no real deals to be had. I’ve done the math and, most often, it is genuinely cheaper to fly all the way to Europe than it is to stay in my home country. (Doing that, unfortunately, requires at least a full week of travel time by simple virtue of the distance to cover.)

None of that is any less true now than when I first pointed it out. But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up. In the past year, we’ve gotten creative. And as a result, we’ve made made two weekend trips work. First, our visit to Minneapolis in June. And then our November visit to New York. On the strength of those two trips, both of which, while slightly frantic, were a resounding success, we just booked a long weekend in Chicago next month.

There’s no doubt – it’s a lot less easy to get to Chicago from Winnipeg for four days than it is to fly from Paris to Barcelona. (Although we rarely had enough money to travel when we lived in Paris in 2012-2013, knowing we could was wonderful. Taking advantage of that when we went back in 2017 was even better.) Any holiday involving an airport requires a high level of patience. But if you love travel like we do, it’s worth it. New York in November certainly was. I have high hopes for Chicago, too.

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