Gentleman’s ride and Alex’s dad in town

After two intense weeks of vacation, we continued full-speed in NY – Monday evening Franzi flew out to Madison, Alex to Chicago. The week was mostly spent with catching up and getting back into the project groove. As a healthy mind could only strive in a healthy body, Franzi and her team did some spinning at a gym called Cycle Bar in the morning, which is a great start to the day. On Thursday, she drove to Chicago – the worldwide Partner meeting and the Americas Women’s meeting was happening there. Thursday around lunch, she took a sightseeing run and finally saw the famous cloud gate! The sun was out, and it was good to see a bit of the city while also being active. For the women’s meeting Franzi had dinner in the Soldier Field Stadium – very American.

On Friday after the meeting, hell basically broke lose slowly but surely. Franzi left the hotel at 12pm, once she got to the airport, she got a notification that her flight was cancelled. She got re-booked onto a 2:15 PM flight which was delayed to 7:30 PM. Until then, she missed a standby call, which was seemingly the only flight leaving Chicago to New York and would have gotten her home by 4 PM in the afternoon. This was super frustrating, especially because it was a self-made misery and there were no more standby seats for the next six hours. Once it was 7:30 PM the other flight boarded, but once everyone was on the plane the airport shut down due to thunder. Every time there is thunder in the radius of 5 miles, the airport has to close for 15 minutes. This happened about 8 times, so 2.5 hours later everyone was still on the plane. Hope came up when the pilot said the airport is now open for 45 minutes. Everyone got seated and buckled up as fast as possible and the plane was on its way to the runway. The engine’s started and Franzi was eager to get home, but once the plane was speeding up, it just stopped again. After 45 minutes of hearing nothing, the pilot announced that all airways going to the East were closed for the rest of the night and the flight was delayed to 7 AM. Franzi was super exhausted at this point and could only find a hotel 30 minutes away from the airport, since everyone was stranded. Once she arrived, she got three hours of sleep and was back at the airport at 5:30 to be on time for the departure at 7. The plane was boarded in time, but once everyone was on the plane there was an announcement that there was no crew. So, off the plane again it was. After several empty promises of having found a new crew, an actual crew arrived 3 hours later, at 10 AM, which finally brought Franzi home. She got home by 3 PM, which means this was a 27-hour travel d(el)ay – definitely not fun and quite draining.

In the meantime, we had Alex’s father Wolfgang in New York since Thursday. As mentioned earlier in our Blog he is currently travelling through Canada, Alaska and the US with his motorbike. His final spurt brought him to NYC before heading back to Halifax to finish the trip. Alex and he went to the classic Katz’s Delicatessen on Thursday and to Tre on Friday after a visit in our office during lunch. Saturday morning Alex and his dad spent at Spiegel for breakfast and coffee. Finally, after freshening up from the strains of travelling, Franzi was also able to join. We met with Alex’s dad, had a pick-me up Snack at Mimicheng’s Dumplings and then strolled through Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho and the East Village and admired a bunch of street art. We ended the day with some Mexican food at Rosie’s.

Sunday was a big day since it was the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride in New York. The Ride unites classic and vintage style motorcycle riders all over the world to raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer research and men’s mental health. It was founded in Sydney by Mark Hawwa. This year about 6 million USD were raised by more than 100k riders taking part in more than 600 rides around the world. We got all fancy dressed up in the morning and then rode over to Brooklyn for a pre-ride meet-up organized by Union Garage. We had a little photo shoot, a coffee and some pastries and then all rode to the meet-up point in Manhattan Seaport.

Overall, the ride was 20 miles long and escorted by the police, so the 800 riders had free roads ahead of them. The ride was great fun and for a good cause, which made it even better. Afterwards, we admired the fine style of other rider’s and some cool bikes. One of them was Magnus Walker, a Porsche Enthusiast and Entrepreneur Alex “knew” from a Ted talk and due to his interesting take on restoring and diving Porsche.

We had a quick lunch in the Seaport area and then intended to go home. On the way, we got stopped by an official DGR photographer, who took some pretty cool shots of us!

After we changed back home, we met again and enjoyed the late summer day with some ice cream and people watching in Washington Square Park. We rounded the weekend off with a good-bye dinner at Local 92 with some Mediterranean food.