The next day I dropped my friends off at the bus station in Albany so that they could go back to Boston, which was good because it put me in downtown Albany where I could scope out the test location. I'm glad I did, because it was pretty un-obvious how one was supposed to reach it, let alone find parking. It was the Empire State Plaza, an enormous complex sitting on the bluffs above the Hudson next to the capitol building. It appeared to have been designed in that white granite socialist utopian vision that marked lots of structures from the 50s-70s. But though the aesthetic was obviously dated, that wasn't really the problem. The problem was that it just wasn't a very usable structure. There were very few signs, pedestrian flow from level to level was extremely inhibited, etc. And it was almost impossible to figure out from google, yahoo, mapquest, or actual in-person experimentation to figure out how to successfully approach the building so that you could park. Fortunately I found a great lot attendant at a non-visitor lot who took about 15 minutes to explain it all to me. As I drove off I told him he was a hero.
Then I found my hotel, a Motel 6 in a different neighborhood but that turned out to be an easy morning commute on local roads. I took myself out to an early dinner and ice cream at Friendly's (where I also reviewed my NY Domestic Relations notes), and then came back and attempted to go to sleep. BarBri had warned us that this might not work, however, and they were right. It was almost impossible to wind down to the point where sleep would be possible. In the end I probably got a reasonable amount for the night itself, but not enough to recover from the night before and, more annoyingly, the previous weeks' nights where noisy neighbors and garbage trucks routinely kept waking me up before I was ready. I did, however, have one very vivid dream that I remember. It was about taking the bar, of course. And in this dream I failed it. But not because I didn't know anything; it was because I kept having to pick up all my test papers and move somewhere else, and it kept using up all my time. I remember feeling so panicked, that I was not going to have enough time to finish the exam because of all the moving around and that I was going to fail the bar because of it. It was definitely a nightmare, this dream. But in a weird way it also made me feel better, because the only reason I was failing was because the circumstances kept making it impossible to finish. It wasn't that I couldn't have passed – in the dream I knew what I needed, I just didn't have the opportunity to get it all down. On the other hand, while it was easy to draw that validating conclusion, waking up in a cold sweat the night before the bar was not all that much fun...