Luckily, we would hit about 8 to 12 stop lights at one time including the yellow and orange ones we slipped through. Then, when it came time to turn right to get to the tunnel, there is another of those- PASSENGER CARS ONLY signs, so I scramble for the map and there is another way for trucks, don’t panic. I think it might be a good time to reinforce how critical it is not to make a wrong turn in this 60 ft rig because it can be quite a painful recovery process. Things are starting to look suspiciously like a traffic jam and as we near the turn, it appears that it is a 120 degree turn back to the right. Well, any of you that have driven a trailer of any size know that you have to swing a little wide when making these sort of turns. In this case we got in the middle lane, cut off the three lanes of traffic on the road we were turning onto and the three lanes of traffic from the road we were turning off of. We blocked the intersection for nearly 10 minutes waiting for the traffic to clear ahead of us. You would think we would have people honking, waving, cussing and throwing rotten vegetables at us but the strange thing was no one even seemed to notice there was a very large agricultural rig blocking their path. It was like they see this kind of idiot everyday. Since that was the case I thought it would be safe to jump out and take a few pictures of the Mad-Max Mobile in a traffic jam in NYC.

After about 45 minutes of inching along, we finally reach the tunnel, we are so close I can smell the freedom, but then a cop that’s been directing traffic, starts heading straight at us. Martin rolls down the window and sure enough he climbs up on the truck, and says “I can’t let you through here with that trailer,” Well, that just shatters my confidence in Mr. HUI, and worse than that now how are we going to get out of here? There are at least three lanes of traffic on either side of us. No worries, he just stops traffic and sends us out to the left, gives us a series of rights and lefts and sends us off to the Lincoln Tunnel. Now how much sense does that make? They are not going to let us through this tunnel, but they will the other?

But first I’ve got to figure out how to get headed back up the island. Somehow we get turned around and end up on Broadway Riverside and drive right past the Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and Central Park and who knows what other famous places we didn’t even know we saw. I told Martin we should just pull over and spend the night in Central Park and then get up and ride over to the Today’s show all decked out in our buckaroo gear, but the logistics just didn’t line up since we were suppose to be riding Thoroughbreds in Virginia at 8 am, maybe next time.

Somewhere in the middle of our site-seeing, we missed the turn to the Lincoln Tunnel which I was a little skeptical of anyway, so my goal now was to get on Henry Hudson Parkway. We are following the signs to 9A and the next thing you know we are under it, down in the Industrial District or something, all I know is all of a sudden everyone and everything disappeared, it was liked wedropped into the underworld. At this point it is looking like we might have to back out about 100 yards when we see an ally off to the left that Martin can back into and get turned around. It’s a darn good thing he could do it all by himself because I wasn’t about to get out of truck and guide him out of there, I was just hoping there weren’t little gremlins crawling up the side of the trailer before we could get out of there. We turned around, figured out where we missed the turn, and made our way onto the Parkway, which, after the fact, I was informed Parkways are only for cars, well duh, the entire Manhattan Island is for PASSENGER CARS ONLY! I think we only made one more wrong turn before we got back on the Washington Bridge, then we were in New Jersey and there was a wave of relief to be back on a road that was intended for Freightliners and its only 1:30 am at least we are not in jail in NYC with our horses impounded!

We pulled into Springhill Farm about 6 am, unloaded the horses, slept for about three hours and spent the rest of the day riding over zealous Thoroughbreds.