One More for the Road

So this is my last shift related post for a little while.  I work at a summer camp every summer, and this summer is no exception.  Part of the reason I love driving the cab is the flexibility it affords me to do things like run away to camp every summer.

I drove my last shift on Monday night.  It was raining, which seems to be the trend lately.  And of course the cab I had had horrible wipers.  Well, it wasn't so much that the wipers themselves were bad, but the motor for them only had two settings.  On and off.  It was okay most of the time since the rain wasn't too bad for the most part.  But there were a few points in the night that the rain came down really hard and I had a hard time seeing the road and had to pull over and wait it out.  Not so good when time is money.

The night was overall pretty steady, but not a lot of big fares.  I only went out of Manhattan once the whole night which is pretty unusual. 

My one fare out of Manhattan was to Brooklyn Heights, so I stopped for a minute and snapped this photo from the Promenade

I decide that since it was my last shift for the summer, I was going to stay out as late as I could.  Things quieted down for a while and I wasn't getting much business.  I did something that I never do.  I sat in a taxi stand.  I pulled up to the stand in front of Grand Central.  Another cabbie friend of mine had texted me that he got a fare from there to JFK, so I was hopeful I would have the same sort of luck that late at night.  I sat there for about 20 minutes.  A woman had gone up to the taxi ahead of me in line, but the driver was asleep, so she came on over to my cab.  She wasn't going far, but was from out of town and needed to get back to her hotel. 

I figured after that I would head back to the stand, but then things picked up for me again.  After a certain hour, a lot of drivers call it quits for the night around the time a lot of bars are closing.  So with less competition and more customers, I managed to get several more fares in my last hour.

My last fare in Manhattan was a pair of guys who were heading home after a night at a bar.  They were in a pretty jovial mood and were pretty psyched to have a woman driver.  We joked that I was secretly a driver in Fast and Furious.  They were super nice and tipped me twice!  So that's never bad.

I realized how late it was and needed to get back to my garage soon, so I headed over the bridge back to Brooklyn.  As I was headed up Flatbush Ave towards the garage, I was waved down by a couple.  They ended up going pretty close to my garage, so it worked out perfectly.  The last few extra bucks in my pocket for the night.

I finally made it back to my garage a little after 4:30am.  The sun was starting to rise.  I haven;t made it to sunrise in the cab yet, so it was a little surreal.  By the time I settled up with the office and drove home, the sun was all the way up. 

Early morning light in the sky over the gas pumps at my garage.

Well, Folks, that's it for now.  I wont have any new driver stories for a while, but if I come across anything to share, I will.  Until then!

Taxi stand sign at JFK.