Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

You might feel compelled to ask, for form’s sake, about my time in Kansas City. As you know, Kansas is a fly-over state, so why were my feet planted upon flat flat earth? And how exactly did I manage to get locked in a stairwell so shortly after arrival? KC happened to be the second stop on a client tour. We are from the Eastern Time Zone, where all the magic happens, yet these Kansas City people refuse to change their watches to accommodate us. So when our flight landed and our iPhones reset, we realize the client meeting is an hour earlier than previously suspected and we are going to miss half of it. We hail a taxi using a weird little midwestern landline and tell the cabbie to step on it. The client’s building is your classic office park surrounded by a sea of asphalt. We grab our luggage and hustle into the elevator. Out of the elevator. We roll up to the client receptionist. She tells us our meeting is in a conference room on the floor belo...

“Are you kidding me? I didn’t even do anything yet!” Tom barks, his hands ten and two on the steering wheel. We'd been on the road for exactly eight seconds when the guy beeped at us. Vigorously. It’d been happening all week, the flagrant and promiscuous honking. We make sure to flick a really respectable Jersey salute, as you do in such situations, and move on. Or at least I move on, but Tom continues to ruminate. He sorts out the facts. “I think it’s this mini-van,” he says finally. “And the Pennsylvania plates. The combination makes people around here go ballistic." Aha. Now I’m paying attention. I snap into immediate action. This is an experiment with my name on it and a short window of opportunity. We’d been left in charge of my parents sky blue Honda mini-van while they hike around Ecuador. We only have a few more days to collect data. All I want to do is drive in and out of the Holland Tunnel with a spreadsheet entitled, “Are New York Area Drivers Spasmodic...