Monday began with a long day at work, and the rest of the week followed the same pattern. By Wednesday, I got home around 9 p.m., completely exhausted and ready to crawl into bed. As I was heading upstairs, my husband called out and asked what I thought about taking the day off work Friday and going to New York City to see either the U.S. Open or a Mets game. I would have been happy to go to the Mets game since there was a new rookie pitcher I thought would be fun to watch, but tennis has never been my thing. He had taken me to the U.S. Open once before, and the following year I politely told him to take someone else because the tickets had been wasted on me.
Still, we are really trying to spend time together, filling time, and tennis is something he’s passionate about so I said I’d do whatever he wanted, but I preferred the Mets game. Since he preferred tennis, we ended up with a tentative plan to possibly do both.
Yes, you read that right. A couple of middle aged people thought it might be a good idea to do a double header, 12 hour day – AFTER a crazy few weeks of moving two kids into college.
I really didn’t want to do that. So I ignored the idea on Thursday, hoping he’d drop it and realize how tired we both were and that neither of us wanted to spend 12 hours in Queens. Luckily, (or so I thought) he didn’t mention it either, and I thought I was off the hook.
On Friday, I woke up early and went to the gym, still hoping he wouldn’t choose to fill the day with both tennis and baseball – or, quite frankly, any trip to Queens. But when I came home from working out, he was up and into it, saying, “All right, you ready to go? I’ve been looking at tickets. We can probably get a good deal — we’ll wait until we get there.” I rolled my eyes, showered, and then crawled back into bed, hiding under the blanket, trying to figure out (1) how I could get out of it, or (2) what in the world I was going to wear for a 12-hour day in New York City. I needed an outfit that would work for outdoor (posh) tennis in the middle of the day — what I call the “Pompous Long Island” look — and then something suitable for the Mets game later that night. I knew the temperature was going to vary widely and that I’d need to either carry or layer my full outfit needs for the day. I pulled the blanket further over my head.
He came into the room, “Um, you’re in bed?”
“Um, can you tell me the weather for today? I’m not sure how to make my outfit work,” I muffled under the covers.
After he checked the weather and talked me off my outfit ledge, I pulled myself out of bed, changed clothes, and we were ready to go.
“Who’s driving?” he asked. I gave him a withering stare. He grabbed the keys.
We had about two hours to get to the U.S. Open, find a parking spot that worked both for the tennis match midday and the Mets game that started at 7 (and finished, possibly, just before midnight), and buy tickets. That’s right, we didn’t have tickets to either of these events when we left our house. This isn’t actually unusual because my husband has perfected the art of the last minute purchase. He has figured out when to buy in order to “buy up.” We have many times purchased tickets from the parking lot. So the fact we didn’t have tickets for the 11:30 match when we left for it at 9:45 wasn’t a big deal.
So we set off, lethargically, and I assumed my husband had done all the research needed since this was his thing, not mine. Traffic wasn’t bad, and we made great time, planning to arrive about 10 minutes before the match he wanted to see. As we got closer, he started talking about parking.
Normally, when we go to Citi Field once a year, we use a specific lot that makes leaving after the game easy. I’m not sure if he assumed this lot would be open or whether he just figured if it wasn’t open, we could find something easily, but, to make a long story short – we could not park where we wanted to park.
Because my husband kinda thought this would be the case, he had a loose plan to park in a tennis center lot where we could walk to both events without moving the car. I asked which lot he’d chosen, and he said, “I don’t know.” That’s when I realized he hadn’t done any research. He had literally just hypothesized without collecting data.
As we drove past the Citi Field lot we wanted — completely empty but also completely closed — we kept going straight with the rest of the traffic. It was at that point that I realized mistake number one: trusting my husband to handle pre-research. It was followed immediately by mistake number two: following the traffic instead of turning left.
Fighting my irritation, I pulled out ChatGPT and asked for parking suggestions. It gave us the name of a parking deck near a mall and the two best lots at the tennis center. We kept following traffic, continuing to circle around the tennis center. There were no open lots. Finally, as we rounded the halfway point of the circle around the complex, we were told we could park and take a shuttle back to the tennis center. A quick Maps search told me we were 2 miles away from Citi Field, where we would be ending the night 12 hours later. That wasn’t ideal for walking back to the car late at night. I suggested we keep circling back toward Citi Field to look for another lot. We did find a bunch of lots, including the ones ChatGPT had recommended – but all of those required pre-purchased parking passes.
We continued around, coming close to making a full circle and ending up back at Citi Field until we hit a road closure and had to detour down small alleys in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go. Down one of those streets, we found a lot run by two guys sitting in lawn chairs. My husband rolled down my window, and asked if there was parking. The two guys looked at each other and smirked, “Yeah, yeah, there’s parking. Twenty bucks.”
My husband asked, “Seriously? If I give you $20, we can park here?”
The guy replied, “Yeah, park behind that truck, nobody’ll know.” I looked around and realized there was no safe way to walk from there to either the tennis center or Citi Field, not to mention our car would be parked illegally in an alley in Queens. For the second time that day, my withering stare got my husband to drive.
We moved ahead, each opening our Maps apps to figure out where to go next. I didn’t realize my husband had muted his navigation on the car’s dashboard, so when I turned mine off, we ended up missing the correct turn. That detour cost us even more time.
We seriously tested our marriage communication while we were lost in Queens, and while he cajoled me into enjoying our “filling time,” I tried REALLY hard not to lose my mind.
With Maps rerouted, I decided to search for private lots near the area, but nothing showed up as available. Then, I went back to ChatGPT, which an hour before had pointed us in the direction of a mall parking lot, about a nine-minute walk from Citi Field and 12 minutes from the U.S. Open. It was worth a shot. It was our only option at that point.
Drawing in my breath, I told my husband to turn at the same spot we should have turned an hour earlier when ChatGPT first gave me its output. We quickly found our way to a big mall, and parked at BJ’s, which was completely legal, by the way, according to the sign that said “event parking will be charged the full day rate.” It cost $25 for the whole day — not bad for New York City.
By then, we still didn’t have tickets to any event but we had a parking spot! We had been monitoring prices, which had steadily dropped from the time we woke up until we first got to the city. By the time we walked up to the tennis center, we were a little over an hour late for the match, and the prices reflected the late arrival. We ended up with amazing seats in the fourth row for a fraction of the original cost and only missed one set. Sometimes, not planning actually works out better.
The tennis matches were fun. My husband loved the tennis, and I appreciated the athleticism of the players. I entertained myself by studying the ball people and trying to figure out their rotations. I nearly solved the pattern during the final game, but just as I was about to confirm it with one more data point, a new team rotated in. I may just have to go back sometime to finish testing my hypothesis.
After tennis, we headed to the Mets game to watch the rookie’s first Major League appearance. While outside the stadium, we found reasonable tickets, bought them, and headed in for the second round of our Queens double header. We stayed until the seventh inning, and luckily, our team was winning. By then, we were exhausted and decided to head home.
In total, we had a 14-hour day filling time — chaotic, exhausting, and definitely an adventure.
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