And as for the cab ride to the airport...
Earlier in the day, I had tried arranging for a car service to pick me up at the theatre this afternoon after rehearsal, but no one had any cars available, so... Time to cab it.
Well, first I tried hailing one on 7th Ave.. Then I tried hailing one on Broadway... then 6th Ave... then 5th Avenue (since I needed to be heading uptown anyway)... The cab strike is over, but since I was trying to catch a cab at the start of rush hour, well.. And it also turns out that a bunch of cabbie's shifts, shift between 5:00-6:00 too. There were lots of "Off Duty" signs lit up. In any case...
I was finally able to hail one down at 5th Ave in front of Bryant Park - which is all "tented up" right now for Fall Fashion Week. I told him I needed to get to La Guardia, and he said he would do his best to get me there as fast as possible. I said I had two hours before my flight, but he mentioned that he had to get his cab back to the garage by 5:30 since someone else was due to take it out for the evening shift. Well... I told him I could try to catch another cab if he was worried that he was going to get penalized for coming in late, but he said since I was a "nice man" that he would do his best to get me to the airport and get himself back to the garage. -He also mentioned that he needed the fare, since he had been on strike the past two days.
We hit the usual traffic snarls on the East Side and on the BQE, but, somehow he managed to get me to LGA at 5:15 - we left midtown at 4:45. Not bad at all! And since his garage was right near the airport... At one point, we did come across an accident, and we thought the traffic had truly stopped. I told him that if he just wanted to pull of the highway and drop me off where I could catch an M60 bus the rest of way, but then the traffic started moving again. And, thankfully, I was flying out of the first terminal, so he didn't have to navigate the loop at the LGA.
To thank him for his service, I ended up paying him what the car service would have cost. He seemed truly grateful for his tip.... Then sped off to make it back to his garage.