If, dear readers, you have an upcoming event in your life that is exhilarating, exciting, totally amazing, and possibly life changing then let me offer you a bit of advice. The way to remain focused on your day to day life without constantly letting your mind wander to the wonders of the journey ahead is NOT to download an iPhone app that shows you the exact time you land down the the second. One might find oneself constantly checking it and lamenting at how long it takes for 100,000 seconds to go by. Given that I started the countdown roughly a month ago which would have shown me 700+ hours and 2.59 million seconds, Monday morning's 12.25 hours seemed magically close. 
After some light packing (i.e. three weeks of clothes, electronics, and accouterments) my lovely church friend Jean picked me up and off I went to the airport.
Here's the most important question... How many Virgins are there in an airport?
In this case it turns out there are two. Virgin Atlantic and Virgin America. I, of course, landed myself in the line for Virgin Atlantic and it wasn't until an hour later when the kindly British woman at the counter said "Passport please" and I said in my most dignified and self-possessed way "um ...what?" that I knew I needed to be one terminal over and that I had about 15 minutes until the cutoff for bag check. I know that the electrifying suspense of my mundane travel hassles is about to drive you over the edge so I'll spare you the therapist's costs and tell you that I made it to the gate with maybe five whole minutes to spare and five thoroughly uneventful hours later I was in NY! (Uneventful except for finally watching my counter hit zero after a few hundred thousand seconds)It was with great relief that I finally made it to the subway terminal where my man was waiting.
(Everybody take a moment to go "Awwwwwwwww" at how cute we are) Done? Ok.
I also got to take my first really cool picture with the schnazzy feature on my new camera (Thanks! You know who you are) that lets me do automatic photo stitching. You can expect some skyscrapers and some Times Square in your bloggy future.
I'm sure it will be a long, long time before I can hear someone say "take the A train" and not get that song stuck in my head. Nonetheless, we took the A train and because of the time of night we arrived at our stop roughly fifteen million local stops later.
Since then there's been walking and rain, The Strand bookstore (18 miles of books!), some more walking, jet lag, and then I walked home. I'm a little more acclimated now so my exploration should increase dramatically and there will be many more stories to share. Until then, enjoy schnazzy stitch pic #2!
