by Doug Parker
Last updated: 12:15 PM ET, Wed January 28, 2015
PHOTO: I'm not all that familiar with this white fluffy stuff. Does this mean you can't take me to Greenwich Village? (photo by Doug Parker)
I'm from Florida and when I came up to New York City for work, I was hoping to experience my first-ever snowfall. What I got was Winter Storm Juno. And even though the storm wasn't as bad as initially reported, it still had a great effect on the city.
I was attending the New York Times Travel Show on Sunday when I got word that a major storm was coming and that I should move my flight reservation to get out early. The only problem was that everyone got to JetBlue before me.
So I had no choice but to ride it out at the Yotel hotel in Hell's Kitchen. (At $69 a night from Hotwire, it was a great deal. My room was compact but nice, almost like a cruise ship cabin - in fact, they're called cabins.)
On Monday, the mayor instituted a curfew on the city so all non-emergency vehicles had to be off the roads by 11 p.m. until further notice. And for the first time ever, the New York City subway system shut down due to snow.
I've never experienced snow before - only hurricanes - so I had no clue what I was in for. Being proactive, I went and bought a $38 pair of snow boots from Payless Shoes, and I am so glad I did.
At 4 p.m. the bottom fell out of the sky, the winds gusted to 45 knots and snow was blasting me in the face. Since the streets in New York City are like a big tic-tac-toe board, any heavy wind coming off the coast blows through the streets like a giant wind tunnel. It was nothing like the peaceful snow I've seen fall in Rockefeller Center watching the "Today" show.
My hotel was right across the street from a CVS store so I picked up some Pepsi, Oreos, Gatorade and granola bars to get me through the night - or next couple of days if everything shut down.
Then I went to Subway to grab a sandwich. I know, who goes to Manhattan and dines at a Subway? But the wind by now was blowing the snow sideways, and I wanted no part of getting snow blasted again.
Around 11 p.m., the local CBS affiliate in Jacksonville, Fla., where I live, saw my social media posts and asked me to do a call-in for the newscast. For effect, I went down to the street to do the interview. It was eerie, because there was no one on the streets and all I could hear was the wind whistling around buildings and the Lincoln Tunnel. My hotel was on the outskirts of the Theater District, making the silence seem more haunting.
As the night went on, the wind and snow got pretty heavy. My hotel room was on the 12th floor, five blocks from the Empire State Building. When I first checked in, it was in clear view, but as the weather deteriorated, so did the view. At 2 a.m., I couldn't see past my hotel window.
When I woke up, I learned the city was spared from the worst. The storm had moved eastward, hitting Long Island with 24 inches of snow. New York City got a little less than half that. When I walked the streets at 9 a.m. Tuesday the city was still a ghost town, but by noon it was starting to get back into full swing. It was strange seeing 10th Avenue lined with vacant snow-covered Yellow taxicabs.
The mayor's office was getting a lot of heat for shutting the city down and enforcing a mandatory curfew on Monday night. If he didn't do that, the city would not have been operational Tuesday. It still wasn't all the way back to normal at noon.
It was interesting seeing The City that Never Sleeps, sleep.
As for me, my flight back to Jacksonville was scheduled to depart at 8 a.m. Wednesday. JetBlue said it was still up in the air. Thankfully, I was able to get back to my sunshine. It's good to be back in the Florida warmth.
Doug Parker is a radio personality and host of Cruise Radio, a weekly podcast reviewing cruise ships and ports of call and answering listeners' travel questions. Doug was recently quoted by USA Today as "one of the pioneers in travel podcasting and a respected resource for vacationers."
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