February 19, 2011

School Vacation Week; Culinary quality of American Airlines; Lawrence Welk

It’s one of the busiest travel days of the year, Day One in the February school vacation, and we handled it like pros. Awake (involuntarily) every hour through the short night, alarm set for 4:45, out of the Embassy Suites (don’t stay there - they want $10 for WiFi) by 5:30, checked in and through security by 5:55 for a flight scheduled to depart at 7:20. Piece of cake.
After we got our seating assignment at the gate, I went to Dunkin Donuts to get Sugar a coffee, walking by the very short line at Starbucks, to get in the very long line at DD. Finally they started boarding our flight and I still had about a 10-minute wait. I returned empty-handed, confidently and pollyannishly telling Sugar not to worry, they’d be sure to have coffee and a muffin or croissant on the plane, even though we might have to pay for it. Wrong. All they had for the ENTIRE FLIGHT of 6 1/2 hours was a croissant with turkey and melted cheese, and a bag of assorted chips! Where’s Ursula when we need her? Luckily, Sugar had a power bar for each of us and that is all we ate until 3 PM Pacific time (6 PM Eastern time). And I was thinking yesterday how it appeared that we would be eating our way around the globe. How things change! Today I thought we would never eat again. Can’t AA throw a few doughnuts or muffins on each flight? Would that kill them? If John Bartosenski ran the airline, we’d have doughnuts.
After a very nice lunch at a seafood restaurant in Oceanside, we drove to our condo timeshare resort. Yes, it’s the Lawrence Welk Resort. Okay, just take me out and shoot me. And now I have to call Jodie, our concierge, and tell her that “we’ve talked it over and we really don’t want to take the 90-minute tour of the property because we’d rather participate in the reenactment of the Bataan Death March on our hands and knees.” And it’s cool here, with showery weather, not the balmy conditions we had in Boston. There’s always tomorrow, God willing.
Love, Dad, Nat, Matt, DB