There was so much to do today, so many things that had been left to the last moment. Picking up laundry, cleaning out the refrigerator, emptying the trash, suspending the paper, paying bills, and above all packing, packing, and packing. Edie knew something was up, and she was not happy about it. She followed me from room to room and looked mournfully at me from her one good eye. We struggled to get ready by mid-morning. John had a doctor’s appointment, but not long after we arrived at his office we were told that the physician was an hour and a half behind on his scheduled and we could not possibly be seen until after one o’clock — when we needed to be in the car on our way to the airport. We had to rebook the appointment for next month. John was disappointed. I was furious. This physician is not not doing surgery on gunshot wounds. Really, how hard is it to stay on schedule?
We took Lyft to the airport. Our driver was pleasant and John asked him where he was from. He was Moroccan, but living in Irvine. He spoke almost flawless English with barely a trace of an accent. We talked about Morocco. I mentioned my friend who worked for the state department and said that she liked it much better there than Algeria and Libya, her previous postings. “Well, of course,” he replied. He asked her name. “I used to work with many state department people in that area,” he remarked without adding any further details. None of it completely fit together at the time, but now I suspect he may have been former CIA.
We took business class this trip. It is a splurge, but if you otherwise spend the first days of the trip trying to recover from the misery of the flight, it is probably worth the money. We are no longer the young guys who slept of the floors of railway stations or airports and cheerfully endured long rides on the tattered seats of second-class busses bouncing down rutted roads between remote Mexican beach towns. One of the things I notice when I take business class is how nicely you are treated. We had almost no wait in line at LAX, while the line for economy class stretched on and on. They sent us through expedited security, and then we went up to the lounge to wait while enjoying free food and drink. We sat on a balcony looking down two stories at people rushing off to their gates or wasting time by pretending to shop in overpriced stores.
We learned that the flight was delayed. This immediately made me apprehensive as I knew that we had only a short turnaround in Munich before catching the next plane to Dubrovnik. When the call finally came to go to the gate, we once again walked past long lines of economy passengers who were kept waiting. I remembered how annoyed I used to feel as I watched those high-paying passengers breeze past me. I felt briefly guilty about it … but only briefly. We are on a relatively new Airbus, but not the very top-of-the-line model we flew when we went to Dubai. The accommodations are nice, but somehow, as John pointed out, they just do not measure up to what Emirates offered. The flight crew was friendly in a German way, that is, if you asked a question, they would answer it. The plane, already delayed for about a half an hour, continued to sit on the runway. The pilot said something about an unattended bag. We could not exactly follow it, but the longer we waited the more anxious I became about making our connection. I tried not to think about it.
Los Angeles looked almost pretty as we took off. It was late afternoon, and the the beach towns we glowed with the golden light of late afternoon. The Santa Monica Mountains still seemed somewhat green from the winter rain, and the sea and the mountains provided a polite border to the unruly sprawl of the city. We flew close to Santa Catalina Island, and just beyond it in the distance I could see San Nicolas. I thought about yet another year of teaching Island of the Blue Dolphins. I have a few weeks: I am going to try to keep my mind off school. As we flew inland, the German national seated in front of me used his iPhone to snap pictures of the Mojave and Chihuahua deserts. I find this landscape monotonous and bleak, but I know Europeans are fascinated by the endless, dry, open spaces. Still, even I snapped a grainy photo or two as we crossed the Sangre de Cristo range, some snow still visible on the high peaks.
Dinner was disappointing. John chose better than I did. He had some charcuterie for an appetizer, and then had the “San Francisco Cioppino” for his entree. It certainly looked like nothing of that name I have ever eaten in California, but the seafood and rice was still pretty good.
I had some bland scallops for my appetizer, and for some reason I ordered the pasta dish. It consisted of six very chewy ravioli on a bed of overcooked spinach and a large piece of mushroom. There were overcooked, over seasoned peas sprinkled over the whole thing, and they reminded me of something I expected to eat in a pub in Bradford, not in the business class of a major European airline.
I am ready to call it a day now. I will not get to post this until we get to Dubrovnik.
