Reporting From The Road

It's MEA weekend, and school is out until Monday, so the girlies and I flew out to San Francisco to visit the Fabulous Babe Suefunky. Mr. Sweetie is in Texas until Friday, when he will join us for a birthday dinner in Chinatown for Pony, who will be 14 !?!

We arrived at our hotel at 1:15 a.m. California time, and since I had a Diet Coke with caffeine on the plane, I'm still wide awake. Here are some impressions from the road:

1. Sun Country is a happier airline than NorthWest, but their new gimmick is that they give you cheeseburgers, while NWA gives you nothing. Due to poor time management on my part, we didn't get dinner before we left, so cheeseburgers it was! And Pony quickly recognized that these weren't the usual cheeseburgers, but something foreign. Reasonably, she wanted to know what she was eating. I asked, and it turns out it is "soy AND beef." Now really, what is the point of that? Other than some misplaced sense of nostalgia for the school lunches of my youth, who eats soy AND beef anymore? Why not just make them soy? Lots of people don't eat beef, but would eat soy. It's not like keeping (or adding?) the beef in makes it taste like beef anyway. Minnesota is a big soy producing state--we don't benefit very much economically from the inclusion of the beef.
2. Black luggage is still very In. A very smart woman in front of us at the check in line had run about 15 rows of duct tape across the front of her black bag and wrote her name and address on it in huge letters--no mistaking that bag on the carousel!
3. Oddly enough, on our flight, a very close second to black luggage was red. Lots and lots of red bags. Green was the next most popular. Tapestry is still a distinct minority, so my luggage is easy to spot.
4. The 2 year old girl at the gate reminded me viscerally of when Pony was that age--there was a strong physical resemblance, and this little girl was clearly an only child (at least, for right now). How odd to look at this little person scooting around, and then look over at my Pony who is taller than I am and very much nothing like she was at 2. It's an odd experience, and makes it feel like perhaps time is not an arrow that only goes one way.
5. It is a great luxury to have a town car waiting to pick you up, especially when the flight lands at 11:50 and the train takes an hour to where you are headed.
6. It is tempting to order a stretch limo, instead of a town car--and you could even get a motorcycle police escort too! Make up some little flags of a pretend country, and you too can feel like royalty!