December already?!

After experienceing that the Holiday Season is ON, I decided it was time to experience a real Thanksgiving-adventure of my own. While we had our own Thanksgiving traditions as a family in Germany and we celebrated Thanksgiving on the ship in our own special way... this was my first REAL Thanksgiving.
It's good to know that even at my age there still are firsts.
To cut it short, my Thanksgiving"weekend" was pretty awesome - good friends, good food, good rugby. What more could I want?
I've also gained new insights and knowledge into the American public transport "system". After my first real test of this "system" I feel that I can say with confidence, that the actual problem is that there is no "system" - it's all just VERY confusing. At one point I had figured it all out an developed my Master Plan: Train to NYC, take a bus from there to D.C., meet up with my friends, explore D.C., Metro into Maryland, Car to Frederick. Enjoy Thanksgiving (that part totally went by plan), bus at 0:30 from a town nearby to NYC, subway to Lexington/103rd and walk to Randall's Island for a7s Rugby tournament.
Needless to say, it didn't go exactly by plan. While the minor hiccups such as finding the bus station and the bus being 1/2 hour late probably aren't even worth mentioning - my Friday night/Saturday morning turned into an adventure.
While we didn't have a problem finding the bus stop this time, I discovered that theat paticular bus never runs on a Friday - which is kind of odd considering that I was holding a ticket and reservation for that bus. Nevertheless, once we made it back to the house I found a "good" connection within minutes. The 2:20 in Baltimore. Just as we embarked on our "it's a good thing it should only take us an hour at night because we only have 1:15 minutes to get there"-trip my friend said, "oh I hope we have enough gas"... yeah, it was already pretty much on empty.
I will spare you the detail of how I finally got on that bus... We arrived sometime before 6am in Chinatown, NY. The only problem was that while I had checked out all the maps and stuff and how to get to the subway station from the bus stop I was originally supposed to come into - I know only sort of knew where I was. And unfortunately, the directions the bus driver gave me to the nearest Metro station weren't exactly accurate.
At that point, I asked my inner compass "Which way" and then just headed off in that direction. The funny part is, that somehow I managed to walk straight toward were I was supposed to be heading (I guess wanting to play Rugby heightened all my sense) I reached 1st Ave and 1 Stree E and thought to myself: This is a good thing. This is the right direction, since I need to get to 1st and 103rd to take the footbridge.
Then I thought - wow, I wonder how long 100 block is. Turns out it's about 6 miles. Though I only walked about 80 before I hit the first subway station...
And I crossed that footbridge and stepped onto the field at 7:30 just as planned. And kept my team entertained once they asked me "by the way Shannon, how DID you get here this morning?" And I said: "Oh, I kinda walked from Chinatown..."