One of the perks of traveling every week is the plethora of stories you are bound to accumulate. Maybe I am lucky enough to accumulate more than your average bear, but I don’t seem to be able to leave the house without something story -worthy happening. So thanks to my wonderful friends who have said I need to write a book someday, I decided I needed a place to recored these many vignettes, since my memory isn’t what it used to be.

And maybe it can be mildly entertaining for these said friends (you know who you are) at the same time.

My first observation is that trying to start a blog over free airport wi-fi may not be the wisest of choices. I did have over an hour before my flight which I, wrongly it turns out, assumed would be plenty  of time to figure out how to start a blog and write my first post. If my flight had not been delayed, I would not even have had enough time to finish setting up my blog, with the inter stellar speeds of airport wi-fi.

But of course my flight is delayed. Because it’s New York. And it’s my travel luck. And I might actually die of shock if one of my flights actually left and arrived as scheduled.

I am in the middle of a month long trip with multiple locations and activities. Now, I am not exactly a “light packer” on the best of days, so packing light for a month long trip is not going to happen. On a normal week, I need a separate bag for my shoes alone. And then I’m in NYC. How do you spend any time here and not accumulate more stuff?

You just don’t.

I may have had to sit on my bag to zip it for this 10 day leg of this trip.

And I may have been lucky to have a bag check agent who looked the other way when the scale hit 50 pounds and kept going.

One of the “things” I have accumulated on this trip to NYC, is a new blow dryer. Not because I needed a new blow dryer when I left home a week ago, or because I forgot to pack said dryer.

No. Because I had not learned how important closing the toilet lid while blow drying one’s hair is.

Hotel bathrooms are small. This is not news. Everything is very close to everything else. This makes multi tasking relatively easy.

And I am a great multi-tasker.

Except when I am blow drying my hair.

With my hair about half dry, I realized I didn’t have my brush. Which was in my bag just outside the door. So I set the blow dryer on the edge of the sink, which was, of course, right next to the toilet.

I did not feel like turning the blow dryer off was a necessary step to take and would only slow down the multi-tasking.

And I watched as my blow dryer vibrated right off the sink. And into the toilet. Whose lid was not closed.

An important point to make here, is that the blow dryer-amazingly- did not short out, spark and stop running. Indeed it did not. It kept running. In the toilet.

So now I am faced with how to get a still running blow dryer, out of water. I have read the huge warning tags on my blowdryer. There is a risk of electrical shock and death when water and blow dryers meet. Neither of these were in my plan for the week.

I grabbed the blowdryer by the middle of the cord- far away from the plug or the actual dryer- and lifted it out of the toilet. It continued to run, and now began spitting all the water it had sucked up out of both ends. All over the bathroom floor.

Now I am holding a drowned, running blowdryer, standing in several inches of water.
And still no electrical shock or death. It must have been my lucky day.

I decided it may be pushing my luck slightly, to try to plug this blow dryer back in and hope it would still work, after surviving all of this.

So this is how I ended up with a new blowdryer in NYC.

And what has led me to share this tip with you. Always close the toilet lid when blow drying your hair.

More to come from this trip I am sure.