Sunday, September 18, 2016.
Rough Roads To Travel.
The crises that have made this such an awful past couple of weeks get a new addition. On her way home from some errands, Mary Ann hears a bad sound coming from her 300,000-mile car. But we need this car Monday to get me and my sister Lynn to the airport as we begin the Eat Club cruise tomorrow. What she describes sounds to me like a timing belt issue. That is not only an expensive repair, but is unlikely to occur tomorrow in time.
Even more frightening to me is MA’s plan should the repair not be feasible. She has been talking for rather a long time about getting a new car. I’m all for that–she has certainly received all the service one can expect even from such a durable vehicle as the Honda is. But she’s talking about her dream car: a Range Rover.
Meanwhile, I feel that I have healed from few other wounds. AT&T agreed to junk my old wireless phone number and replace it with one that seems to be working. I can’t head out on a two-week cruise with no wireless phone.
Meanwhile, we find that we have issued two contradictory invitations to a lobster lunch in Nova Scotia. Mary Ann and I were both pitching the event, but with different parameters, causing confusion among our diners. This ate up lot of time, and led to the man organizing the tour to ask for a deposit. I don’t make a dime from the lobster lunch, so I am very reluctant about putting up a pile of bucks to hold the vehicles in place. But I can’t say I blame the guy.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016.
To New York.
I am up at three-thirty in the morning. At the same moment, my sister Lynn is also on her way to the airport, with our big sister Judy taking care of that bit of chauffeurship. Mary Ann travels by air more often than I do, and she says that if we leave at four, we will make it right on time to Moisant Field. That was actually my idea, and it was a bad one. We barely make the checked-bags deadline, and then only by all a but throwing my one bag to the skycap.
We fly to Charlotte, NC on the morniing after some unrest in that city. I don't learn about that until we were on the connecting flight to La Guardia. To my great astonishment, we (I have been joined by Lynn) have no problem finding the representative from Princess Cruises, who is waiting to take us to a car that would deliver us to the Hotel Inter-Continental near Central Park. The lady driving the car took us on a three-hour tour of Manhattan, through a fantastic amount of traffic largely generated by President Obama’s final appearance at the United Nations. The tour was highly miscellaneous, as we threaded our way through neighborhoods we might not have otherwise seen.
We arrive at the hotel to find that our room is ready–except for one important matter. Our room has only a king-size bed. Fortunately, the hotel has some other rooms, and we get one woth two singles. We settle inn, and Lynn heads out to find a charger for her phone. I take a wonderful nap, much assured that everything seems to be in order. At least for this day.
Our first merger with the other Eat Clubbers is dinner at Patsy's, a long-running Manhatttan Italian restaurant. It's main claim to fame is that it was Frank Sinatra's favorite restaurant--a fact that is ratified by many documents and artifacts on the walls. I meet the son of the original Patsy, an older gentleman on whom I try a concept. "If someone were to come in here and sings a credible Sinatra classic, would he get a free shot of Jack Daniel's Black?" I ask him.
Only if Sinatra said so personally," he says, putting an end to my hopeful idea. (I was more interested in the singing than the reward.)
Our group at Patsy's is pretty sparse. Just eight of us, out of a total Eat Club group of fifty-one. I find out that of that total, only twenty-four were spending time in New York before going to the ship. And that most of those had gone to plays instead of dinner.
The dinner is not quite as good as the one I had last time we visited Patsy's. The portions are tremendous, but the food is toned town. For example, I have clams casino in mind for my appetizer. They don't have that on the menu anymore, although something that resembles Mosca's Italian oysters is available, made with clams but otherwise familiar to New Orleans diners as "Italian oysters." My entree is a variation of veal Marsala, but with very large rolls of baby white veal intertwined with pasta. Good, but I get through only about half of it before my appetite flags.
Lynn and most of the Eat Clubbers get pasta dishes of similar size. I wonder of this is an attempt to tuck into the success (it's packed all the time) of the nearby Carmine's. That's a restaurant about which I often here from people just back from New York trip. It's all about hillocks of food.
