For Wanderlust Women “New York or Bust” takes on new meaning!

We all have a “bff,” someone who has been there since childhood or high school and who knows all of your dirty secrets.  She’s the person you call to share your boyfriend stories with and the same person who’s there to sit with you for two hours at unemployment, just because!  For me it’s Louise, yes, Thelma and Louise, because we have been in so much trouble it’s amazing no police were involved before this visit to the Big Apple.

This Sunday started out like any other for two native New Yorkers who have each lived and worked in Manhattan for more years than either of us will admit.  To say we know the city is an understatement.  Yet, this sunny day we decided to play tourists and see what havoc we could bring to the city we love so much.  Little did we know that when we left on our big adventure and I joked about needing bail money before the day was out……..that bail money might be a good thing to have in our back pocket.

We set our radar for the South Street Seaport where all tourists flock on a sunny day in NYC.  No sooner had we parked the car then we both spied a clothing boutique often frequented by city girls in the know.  Now, we were both keenly aware that the financial district is a ghost town on Sundays, yet we got as giddy as schoolgirls because this particular store had huge SALE signs beckoning to us like the sirens luring sailors off the coast of Paestum (you see everything does have an Italian twist in my life).  Not only were there sale signs, HUGE sale signs, but the store was obviously open because there was another couple shopping inside.

We enter, perusing the racks of “sale” items………I’m grabbing sundresses to try on while Louise, who’s ADDICTED to sunglasses and big bags, is grabbing at stock like an addict in a crack-house.  Not 5 minutes later, in walks one of New York’s finest, an officer in blue.  He’s laid back and smiling and wonders why we are in the store.  You see, it seems this store is CLOSED on Saturdays and Sundays (I told you the Financial District is a ghost town on the weekends), yet there we were, Thelma and Louise and a couple of tourists, shopping through the sale racks.

Our mugshot!

We were dumbfounded.  We had apparently tripped the store’s alarm, calling Officer Joe and his partner to the scene.  He let us go.  He didn’t even want to frisk me.  Hey, I volunteered – I wanted to look obliging and all.

The lawyer in me wondered since there was no breaking but definitely entering……..and NY doesn’t have such a crime………..could we be charged with criminal trespass or burglary?  Well, for burglary you must enter with the intent to commit a crime and true it would have been criminal to add more bad debt for a cheap sundress, but I did intend to pay for it.  As to criminal trespass, we would have had to enter the building which was enclosed in a manner designed to exclude intruders.  Here the doors were unlocked so no one was being excluded.

photo courtesy: sign-farm.com

We left Officer Joe very puzzled, looking at the door’s lock trying to figure out how the four of us entered a store that was supposedly locked for the weekend…………or was it?  They say ghosts live downtown.  Maybe they do and we were the ghostbusters…………whatever it was, at least we weren’t busted!

Louise waiting by our getaway car! Ocean blue Lamborghini, what else?