“Of Bears, Bull and Beagles!”

"Near, Far, Wherever you are........"

Sod's Law says that whenever disaster strikes it will be when you have friends coming to stay.

The other weekend Jenny and her better half came up to NYC to visit. Expecting them around lunchtime Mark and I got up in the morning with a list of chores to do in preparation. The list went out the window when Mark walked out of the bedroom and into the living area to find water coming half way up his feet. Water was everywhere.

A mains water pipe on the 15th floor (the floor above us) had burst and had flooded floors 15, 14 and also the lobby because the water poured down the elevator shafts aka Niagara Falls!. Of course water being water will always travel down until it can go no further so in the course of the next 12 hours it went from floor to floor till it reached ground level.

It was a fun morning - in a not at all fun kind of a way! After a quick rendition of "Singing in the Rain" and stomping our feet in the water like Gene Kelly, we set to mopping it all up. This was an ongoing battle because it just kept coming!

With visitors arriving in mere hours and no way to contact them since they had already been on the road for several hours, no water, no power and no elevators, things were not looking good.
Our building has high ceilings so climbing the 14 floors to our apartment is more like 28 flights of stairs - Poor Jenny & Calvin. I decided that a couple of hotel rooms might be the best option for all of us. Haha - not in Manhattan on a holiday weekend, I couldn't find anything in the area for less than $600 per night (ouch). So we had no choice but to hunker down for the night and hope that the utilities were restored sooner rather than later.

Luckily the water and power came back on 20 mins before they arrived, so Mark and I managed to shower and make coffee. Then the building staff managed to turn on the one dry elevator to the 18th floor just as Jenny & Calvin arrived, so they only had to walk down 4 flights.

Fun and games, but it was great seeing Jenny again and we had a great weekend nonetheless.

Now weeks after finally all the repairs to the apartment have been finished, new floors, new plaster, fresh paint etc, it's like it never happened. Naturally we took pictures.