I Went To Morocco!!

Sunday March 17, 2019

But first we made a stopover in NYC....

Ok, so yah I went to Morocco with Randy and my cousin Susie, and her husband Evam.  If tou remember they came with us on Safari in 2017 also.  We found ourselves some good travel buddies!

The bonus thing with them are since they both work for Hawaiian we get to share their perks.  We're on her buddy pass list so we get to fly super cheap (although it is standby...) but we do save a whole bunch of money.

So, it's nothing new that we encounter some drama right?  I don't know if you remember but we travelled at the same time in 2017 when NYC got caught in a blizzard so our flight got cancelled and we had to scramble to get to Dubai to make our connecting flight.  Welll.....this time we didn't realize that it was the beginning of spring break!  Our original plan was to go HNL-JFK on Monday, but a few days before we had to leave we looked at the seats and decided leaving on Sunday will be safer.   On Saturday we looked again and there was no way we were gonna make it on that JFK flight.  There were too many people on standby with higher seniority than them so we had to go with plan B.  We fly to San Francisco then connect with Alaska Airlines to JFK.  The morning of the flight we were numbered 12-15 on a list of 25.  I think there were about 17 seats open or something like that.  That is too close for comfort for me.  Anyways, we got to the gate and they started calling out all the standby people for their seats.  They weren't calling us.  Finally at the last minute they called us over.  Since they are both pilots Evam got to sit in what's called a "jump seat" where he didn't sit with the regular passengers, he got to sit up with the crew. If it wasn't for that we wouldn't have made it on.  We were the last people to be seated in a sold out flight.  PHEW!!  I was sweatin!!!  Randy had no clue what was going on, I didn't want him to stress out.

Sorry, plenty words to read in this post...So we get to New York around 7am.  Instead of taking the train to the city we opted to uber it.  They quoted me $56 I think to get us to the Lower East Side.  Since Susie and Evam fly into the city a lot they know the route to get there.  The uber dude took us another route, next to the Hudson River.  They were saying "oooh, this is a nice route, look! We can see the Statue of Liberty!"  Anyways, we got to our destination and we tipped the guy 10 bucks and we went on our merry way.  I then get a message on my phone that I had been charged this:

WHAT DA HELL???

Long story short, Susie ended up writing up a complaint for me (a damn good one too!) and I got refunded $47.82.  I'll post her complaint on another post so this one won't be as long.

K drama not done yet!  Sheesh!  Ok so we made an agreement with the airbnb guy that we could drop off our bags at noon then checkin at 4.  Since we got in so early we didn't want to drag our bags all around with us.  I emailed him when we landed to get instructions on where to go but I got no response.  So around 9:30 we went to a nearby Starbucks to kill time until he wrote me back.  Around 11 he sent instructions on where to get the keys from the keybox at a local store.  We walked to the place, which was a good 10 minute fast paced walk, and there were no keys.  We walked to the address of the apartment (another 10 minutes away) and buzzed it and no one answered.  It is not after 12.  At 1:30 he writes us to go ahead and go back to the apartment and call the maid and she will let us in and give us the keys.  Randy didn't trust him so he went by himself to check it out.  Guess what??  She didn't answer her phone!  So we emailed him again, he wrote back at 2:15 that we can go in now and she was waiting for us.  By then we said forget it cause we were starving and tired of waiting around so we went to get something to eat.

We went to Russ and Daughters since it was close by and we knew it was gonna be good...

I got lox and bagels

Everyone else dug in before I remembered to take a pic.  But Randy got a breakfast Martini and it was yummy!

After lunch we tried the keybox again and VOILA!  FINALLY!!

I didn't even get pictures of the room I was so exhausted.  After we relaxed a little bit we went to go get some pizza at a restaurant my brother in law told me about.  I saw a youtube video on it and it looked yummy.  It was super close to our apartment so it was perfect!

They only make 5 different kinds of pizzas, and an occasional special one.  All of them are very similar

This seems weird, Bufala mozzarella with (I think was) a blood red orange.  IT WAS DELICIOUS TOGETHER

We ordered the Margherita and the Bianca.  It may not look like much but I think these were the best pizzas i've ever eaten.  This pizza was AMAZING.  The crust was nice and chewy and it was just super delicious!

Ok so that's it for my first day in New York.  Writing this was just as exhausting as experiencing it.