Okay, here’s the scenario. You’re at an out-of-town convention in City X. You’re staying in a fairly decent, although not too expensive, downtown hotel. You have a fairly decent rental car at your disposal.
So, God decides to fake out all the meteorologists and send a bona fide blizzard instead of the “rain, possibly mixed with some snow” that was predicted. It takes everyone by surprise, schools are closed, many roads are closed, the airport is shut down, and you’re trapped downtown for a couple of days.
What city would you like “City X” to be?
Me, I’d pick Washington, D.C. (Don’t laugh.) For two reasons:
First, because there’s a lot of cool indoor stuff that I’d wanna see, mainly the Smithsonian (the WHOLE Smithsonian–I’d want to get my money’s worth).
Second, it evidently only takes a couple inches of snow to shut down D.C., so I, being a born-and-raised Midwesterner, would have no trouble driving on the roads, and since all the panic-stricken Capitalizers would be huddled in their homes over space heaters, I’d have the place to myself.
: Second, it evidently only takes a couple inches of snow
: to shut down D.C., so I, being a born-and-raised
: Midwesterner, would have no trouble driving on the roads,
: and since all the panic-stricken Capitalizers would be
: huddled in their homes over space heaters, I’d have the
: place to myself.
But … if Washington is closed down, wouldn’t the Smithsonian be too? Besides, a real blizzard ain’t two inches of snow. I’m originally from Upstate New York, where you occasionally saw two or three feet of snow fall in a day.
Let’s say you get the aforementioned 60 cm of snow in 24 hours? Rochester is boring, and Buffalo would be cleared out in a few hours. Naaah, take me to either Toronto, where the subway will still be running and the pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods will provide enough diversions to keep me occupied for several days, or a ski town like Aspen, Vail or Breckenridge, where the city center is adjacent to the lift lines. With two feet of fresh powder, I can finally attempt some blue runs.
Montreal. The city is built for blizzards, so you can get pretty much anywhere regardless of conditions outside. I’ve never been on a better subway system anywhere, and there are endless mazes of underground walkways connecting everything. Combine this with heavily European culture and food, and i can’t see what not to like.
I wonder if Toronto’s system is as impressive. I’ve never been there, but i hear it’s a great place.
Alessan kinda beat me to it, but I’d have to say Key West.
I’d sit in the hotel bar, suave in a muffler and Russian fur hat, sipping a hot brandy toddy, while everyone walked back and forth in the lobby saying “What the fuck? What the FUCK???”
Damn. I was gonna post “Honolulu”, but Alessan and Jophiel beat me to the punch.
On a more serious note, I’d go with NYC. DC’s out because I already live here, and because in our last blizzard, the only part of the Smithsonian that opened was Air and Space. I’m betting NYC would be harder to shut down, and I can’t imagine running out of stuff to do and see there, even if it’s 95% closed.
the city doesn’t matter… i would love to be stuck in a library for a few days. or perhaps a mall just zipping around from store to store, trying out stuff.
Blizzard? I’ve been in a couple.
Once I was in Munich during a blizzard.
It was the year they were digging the subway, '68?, and all the streets had to be crossed by wooden pedestrian bridges up over the street at every corner.
When they were impassible, and the road was a hole in the ground, the city folk were trapped on their own blocks.
Fortunately, my hotel had a decent dining room and all of us had a grand time and became instant war mates.
it looks like trenton might be fun. they are reenacting the battle of trenton in the middle of a nor’easter. really quite something. look at the red coats run.
I have a very dear friend there who is amazingly interesting (a francophone public radio culture and affairs producer now taking a grad degree in communications and culture), and who is very in tune with Montreal life. In the morning we would slap on some rock skiis and try to make it up and down the mountain between the stuck cars, pretending we were Jackrabbit Johansen setting a course for the Red Men. Once back down and across to the old quarter, we would visit a few cafes that might still open up in the storm, hopefully enticing a few other hardy souls to join us on foot in the finale of our urban ski tour. As the sun sets in the late afternoon we would catch a sauna, a massage, and a snooze, head out again for an evening in a fine veggi restaurant, and then join up with his friends to dance the night away. Sigh… my friend was right. I was born in the wrong culture.
