Williesha Lakin

My mother and I planned a brief getaway to New York City one steaming July 2005 weekend. Looking back on it now, I'll bet our taxi driver from the airport to our hotel in Brooklyn will never forget this 30-minute fare. I wish I could describe the sites traveling through the streets of New York, but I was too busy calming my frantic niece over the phone.

It was probably the picture-perfect New York moment. Two passengers in the back of a cab, both talking incessantly on their cell phones. For some reason, my niece was petrified that a police officer had showed up unannounced at our home in South Carolina and was at our door. She wouldn't answer the door and thought because she was home alone, the cop would "take her away." Where she devised this reasoning, I have no idea.

We found out as we reached our hotel that she had been sitting on our cordless phone. If you press and hold buttons for a certain period of time, 9-1-1 is automatically dialed – a useful service during a real emergency, but a terrifying experience for a third grader.

So what's a trip to the Big Apple without a worm or two to spoil things temporarily? In between the delicious bites of our four-day trip - the American Museum of Natural History. . .Chinatown - there were more pitfalls, including that very first night, when the hotel clerk double charged my room  on my debit card, securing that I would have no money to spend for the
entire weekend.

I tried to withdraw money, only to get the dreaded "insufficient funds" message. The clerk simply thought I just didn't have enough money to cover  the bill. The hotel staff would not be convinced until I could reach the bank Monday morning, our check-out day, that it was their fault I was instantly broke on vacation.

My mother and I realized - to our dismay - that our entire New York trip  would be financed with just her money alone, which we knew wouldn't be enough. My Dad wired us some money the next day, but we were on our own until then. Forsaking the consequences, my mother and I, both pretty hungry  after a long day, took a walk through Brooklyn to find something to eat.

This wouldn't have felt so incredibly jaw-dropping in retrospect if it wasn't after midnight. We made it to the Cheesecake Factory and had  dinner...Mom's treat, of course. Thankfully, we managed to save a lot of money thanks to our tour guide, Mom's old friend from Brooklyn who took us on a long but satisfying walking tour of the city.

Then, at the end of our trip, there was the last-minute flight cancellation, the interminable wait to get a new flight at check-in and our hasty placement for the night at a Best Western in Queens. So why was our flight canceled? Some flight staffers decided not to show up to work that day, so there weren't enough folks to man the plane. Thankfully, we found out about the cancellation before we got to the airport, thanks to an SMS alert.

We wouldn't make it back into Columbia until our work week had already started, and after getting up at 5 a.m. just to make the 7 a.m. flight, I'm still amazed I made it into work that afternoon. By then, both of us had  nearly forgotten about the great memories we had. But they are still there, captured in photographs and my online journal.