[title type="h5"]Saturday, April 12, 2014.
Back To The French Quarter. [/title]
Today was the second of two live-on-location broadcasts from the French Quarter Festival. The weather was nice, but not as perfect as on Thursday. A little warmer, a lot more humid. As if anyone really cares.
Mary Ann came in with me for the day. She's a big fan of the Festival, with its combination of grazing on small portions and the selection limited to New Orleans food. But a piece of news received yesterday is alarming her enough to eclipse both the Festival and the looming specter of the lengthy vacation we will begin Monday.
Jude informed us last night that tomorrow he will put a ring on the finger of his girlfriend. He even sent a photo of the ring. The Marys now have a new topic to fill all their thoughts and hours, beginning with what the answer will be from the girl. The two of us certainly talked about nothing else all the way over.
I made a blunder in the middle of the show, when I mentioned on the air that Jude would pop the question. Mary Ann was horrified that I let the trout out of the net. It was a mistake, but not a harmful one: the show was on 1350, not WWL. The listenership on weekends of that station may as well be zero. I got not one call during the entire three hours. And nobody heard the news to spread it on the grapevine.
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[title type="h2"]Sunday, April 13, 2014.
Getting Ready To Travel, With Palms Upraised.[/title]
I am so nearly up to speed for our European semi-vacation that I felt good about taking two hours off for Palm Sunday Mass at St. Jane's in Abita Springs. For some reason, Mary Ann thinks of this as a major ecclesiastical day. She didn't even mind the long version of today's Gospel--a surprise to find at a Sunday evening Mass. We made up the time by not going to lunch or dinner.
I am nearly packed. My subscribers will get at least a limited edition of the New Orleans Menu every day the entire time I'm gone, without even a day missed.
We are set for the special events that will take place when the Eat Clubbers begin to join me this Friday. The guest hosts for the radio show are nearly set up (if you count Mary Ann's usual loose ends, tied up on the way to the airport.)
Mary Leigh and The Boy are finishing the big pre-vacation project of building a fence around the house to contain the dogs. I am concerned that while the fence has definitely affected the moods of the German shepherds, we have not really put it to the ultimate test: will Susie, a very street-smart dog, figure out how to penetrate the barrier? I'll believe it only when I see her still confined tomorrow.
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[title type="h5"]Monday, April 14, 2014.
Up, Up And Away.[/title]
The first thing to greet Mary Ann's eyes this morning was the sight of Susie running free down the driveway. She has found the barrier around the house porous. It is too late to do anything about that now. Mary Ann pooh-poohed me when, a week ago, I said that we ought to test the setup before believing in it. Oh, well. The dogs have survived our absences (with the help of our friends) before, including the six weeks after Katrina.
We had to leave earlier than planned. Mary Ann had our New Orleans-to-Atlanta tickets rejiggered to get slightly better seats. That made it impossible to print boarding passes. And it's ultimately an international journey, requiring other advanced check-in rituals. Fortunately, one of the baggage handlers out front recognized me and made our checkin more than worth the tip I gave him.
Mary Leigh and The Boy left before we did. They will fly to Newark, then to Naples. We will not see them again until Friday in Rome. Mary Ann is surprisingly calm about this. But our daughter is a savvy, confident traveler who has been to Europe six times. (She's twenty-one. I didn't make my first trip there until twenty-seven.) The Boy has not been to Europe, but he is able-bodied and resourceful.
We had to step lively to make our connection for Brussels in Atlanta. Mary Ann, of course, had a plan. She thought that we might be able to score first-class seats with a combination of seat availability and our good story. The first part of this journey will be a re-enactment of some parts of our honeymoon, twenty-five years ago this past February. An incredible deal on a trip to Belgium, replete with attractive package of amenities, led to a magnificent week of wandering around that highly underrated country.
That did not cut any ice with the gate attendant, who said that we could upgrade to first, but that it wwould cost $10,000--eight times what we paid in total for our original visit. And this flight is equipped with those luxurious pods MA yearns for.But even she could not in good conscience make that absurd deal.
We found the 767 airliner comfortable enough, even to the point of admitting that the food served was edible. The first time around it was much more than that. Those were the days when trans-oceanic dinners aloft were served in courses, with metal knives and forks and wine from bottles. We watched two movies with similar themes. The first had Vince Vaughn discovering that by making frequent contributions to a sperm bank, he was the biological father of hundreds of now-grown children. Many of whom want to meet him, with complications. The second was the true story of a young woman who failed at becoming a nun, got pregnant, lived with the nuns as a slave, then had her child sold from under her. Strange that these both came up on this particular journey for us.
We each managed to get about an hour of sleep on the plane, but we were well awake when the first rainbow-like ribbon of color appeared in advance of the sunrise, a few hundred miles shy of Ireland.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris April 24, 2014 15:45 in
