Michigan is a grey place. Really it’s a profoundly grey place. We have all of the clouds of Seattle, but none of the excitement, and this starts to wear on all of us after some time, I think. This is particularly the case now, as the winter season wanes and our bodies and minds yearn for the more inviting days of spring, with all of the sensations, smells, tastes, and colors she brings.
I have to be honest: it wasn’t an entirely horrid winter, although perhaps I’m using last year, with its record snowfall, as an unfair point of reference. Through the end of January it was cold, but not particularly snowy or frigid. Then February arrived, and things turned ugly, with a month of unforgiving unrelenting weather. Temperatures of -18 and below were all too common, and the extremis of the season kept us sequestered inside, where the sunlight doesn’t penetrate to warm our spirits.
But daylight savings time has finally passed, granting our evenings an extra hour of much-needed illumination, and the thaw has begun, with the unhurried melting of the snow revealing months of accumulated detrius, the small rivulets of melt enough only to distribute and deepen the mud, while not actually cleansing anything. This parsimonious clemency of early March is not enough, however. I need more, and this is the perfect time for Butterblogger to escape, recover, and renew. The fierce Indonesian sun is only a faint memory to my rapidly wanning skin, and I seek to feel the ardor of the sun again upon my face.
With that, I am once more off to Hawaii. This time to the older end of the chain – I am off to Kauai,where I will meet up with D for a week of food and fun.
This morning started a bit unfortnuately. My original itinerary took me from Detroit to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Lihue (Kauai). As soon as we boarded the plane we had to leave again for a maintenance issue. Official word was a 30 minute delay Unofficial word was an hour delay. Based on the latter I decided to rebook via Salt Lake City. It meant waiting for the flight, but I had a concern about missing my connection in ATL.
The flight to SLC was aboard a rickety old 757 that Delta desperately needs to update. The tracking on the VCR couldn’t be adjusted (remember tracking?!) so the pre-flight instructional video was nearly unwatchable (not that many people pay attention anyway). I slept most of the flight, waking only long enough to eat a cheeseburger served on a dried out crouton in the shape of a bun. It was airplane food. It was fine. The dessert, a slice of cheese danish was good.
In SLC I was happy to be off of the plane and onto something better. I deplaned and found the monitor listing connections. Gate C8 – hmm – I must have missed that gate. Anyway I looked around a bit. The Salt Lake City airport has an absolutely beautiful view of the surrounding mountains. After taking in the view, I turned around and saw my gate. It took me a moment to process this, but it turns out my next plane was leaving from the same gate at which I had landed. Yup the same crappy old 757.
I got these on the flight. They were spectacular. It was like eating little pirouline bites. I highly recommend them.
And guess what happened when I got to LAX. Yup – I got off the plane, turned around, read the monitor, and found that I would be yet again on the same plane. This apparently wasn’t originally planned, but a series of equipment changes has put me on Old Bessie for another leg.
I expected a Mai Tai when I got on board, but because of the equipment changes it wasn’t to be. Fortunately, they were catered at the last minute so I will be getting one at some point. Whew.
Dinner options were beef rib or rigatoni. I chose the rib. I think I’ve had this dish before. It’s decent. Not remarkable, but solid.
The flight itself was bumpy the entire length of the journey, running long because we were flying into a 100 mph headwind. But we did eventually arrive at Lihue, where we picked up our car and drove to the condo we were renting so we could finally get some real sleep
butterblogger 