I forgot to report my Friday subway adventure! Friday afternoon I left the office at 4:45, but I didn't make it home until nearly 7:00 pm. Seems most all of the underground subway lines leading into Queens were flooded in the thunderstorms.

My usual 6 station was jam-packed with non-commuting commuters, so I walked over to Herald Square to catch the R home. I took a Q instead since it turned out that R was terminating at Times Square, and E, R, and V trains weren't running to Queens. At 57th Street I went topside to try to call █████ and warn her to take the N or W. But by the time I got back down to the platform, the N and W were shut down as well. I took the Q back downtown to Times Square and set off for the 7 train.

A huge crowd was trying to fit down the tiny staircase to the 7 platform in the bowels of the station, like sand in an hourglass, so I slipped down to the 2/3 platform and took a shortcut down to the 7 platform that apparently almost no one else knows about. I managed to get onto the least crowded 7 train, and the one that left first. The crowd on the platform at Grand Central, though, was truly terrifying in its vastness, and one woman was yelling at everyone on the train to move to the center of the car or else be responsible for tragedy in the station. People packed in so tight that I (being a good citizen in the middle of the car) almost could not get out at Queenborough Plaza.

I probably could have caught an N shuttle to Ditmars at Queensborough Plaza, but by the time I realized this I was down at street level and walking toward home. As I got close to the 39th Street station, I decided to try again and ascended to the N platform. █████ and I had been calling each other back and forth but for some reason not catching each other. She was walking home from midtown, and up on the platform I got a message from her saying she had just made it over the bridge. After ten minutes or so, no train had materialized, so I threw in the towel, descended again to the street, and kept walking.

Oh, yeah, it was raining.

I walked east on Northern Boulevard to Steinway, then turned north. I was less than a block from home when █████ called me and reported a location that was just a couple of blocks south of me. If only the damn cell service had worked better! We could probably have walked all the way home from Queensborough Plaza together.

We rewarded our long walks home by calling out for pizza and watching Word Wars on DVD. And I thought SF fans were crazy!

UPDATE: Neither █████ nor I can find any mention of this gigantic subway snafu in the weekend papers.