Travel with Dale & Margaret

San Francisco Airport Fairfield Hotel

We were up at 5:30 am and took the hotel shuttle to the airport with a driver who was a tall, good looking black man.  He had a very deep resonant voice and, in-between making his announcements, he sang along with some classic Barry White type songs.  Nice way to make an otherwise mundane activity into something interesting.

The SFO airport was a ghost town, check-in went smoothly since I am lifetime Platinum so we get to use the First Class check-in even when we travel coach. But, let’s not talk about this because Margaret likes to travel Business Class and I just couldn’t get my head around paying about $8,000 more for this trip and upgrades just don’t happen in 2015 regardless of your status. One interesting milestone that will happen on this trip is Margaret will become lifetime Platinum on American with our return trip. That means that she will eclipse 2 million miles on American. I probably have 3 million on American and well over 5 million on all carriers. Hard to believe that we put our bodies through that grief but we did.

We boarded our flight to Charlotte on-time after getting our latte’s.  The plane was an American-USAir A310 and we had aisle seats sort of across from each other for the 4+ hour flight.  We ate what we could of the standard airplane food…gluten free or not and I read Dana Perino’s new book and Margaret played her 3’s game on her iPad mini.

Upon arrival in Charlotte we had a long-ish walk from B Terminal to D Terminal later and, with the limited time we had we bought a bunch (meaning probably too much) of s0-so sushi near our gate and boarded our flight to Barcelona on-time. Another former USAir plane, this time a wide-body A320. This time we sat side-by-side on the 2 seat side in coach.  The flight was only about 80% full but we decided to forego taking an entire center row that we could lay down and sleep on. Margaret’s not too big on that but I used to spend what seems like half my life taking red-eyes back East doing that, complete with minor league hockey teams once in a while.  Margaret had purchased two foam neck pillows just before boarding (two for the price of one of course) so she figured we could just sleep in our coach seats.  I had purple, she had black and white leopard style.  Very stylish!  But a pain in the butt carrying them around the airport.

After boarding they had a problem with the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) and had to move fuel around to different tanks for weight balancing so we ending up leaving an hour late. While we both took ½ an ambien so we would sleep it didn’t do much for either of us. When we ended up landing on time in Barcelona after a 9 hour flight both had about 2 hours of sleep but I finished my book and we had both watched a couple movies. We had red eyes but it was our own fault.

Along the way we got very familiar with a woman who had (probably inappropriately) dressed in a tennis outfit of sorts.  She kept forgetting something that she had put in the center overhead compartment so about 5 times she climbed on a guy’s seat and pulled out something.  I got a picture of it about halfway through her exploits.  Pretty crazy.

We’ll cover the arrival into Barcelona in the next post.

Carmel, CA

I’ll apologize up-front for some of the boring bits of the blog posts to follow. You really should just skip this post and go to the next one. Too much detail I know but, after all, it’s really for us to remember our travels and what we were doing back in the day when we get old so as you read through this blog you might just scan quickly for the truly interesting bits (if any) and ignore the rest. It’s amazing how quickly your forget events on trips like this where much of it is similar.

With our move from our big Reno house going on for the last 6 weeks, every day lately has been very busy with barely a moment to just sit down and relax. Today was no different. Our plan was to leave for the San Francisco airport (SFO) at 4:30 pm, arrive at the Fairfield hotel right outside the airport at 6:30 and have dinner at the nearby Marriot’s Hanger steakhouse at 7:00 pm. Not the most exciting way to start off our trip to the French and Italian Riviera but it will have to do.

I woke up at 6:30 and got my morning latte and one of Margaret’s fantastic Paleo Morning Glory muffins (see the recipe on this blog) with coconut oil, olive oil and strawberries. Then, I put the now empty roll-aboard bags into the garage and drove to our new San Carlos project house to find the box that had my dress shoes and pick up a few more boxes of our packed stuff. I found the shoes in a box of stuff with wooden hangers, loaded some others marked “Dale’s Office “and headed back home just in time to see that Margaret was up with Spencer and was making her first double latte. Margaret made a nice breakfast for us while I continued going through the clothes that I had dumped on the guest bed upstairs, sorting it into things that I would hang up in the closet, ski clothes that I’d dump in a box for future sorting and things that would go in the Goodwill bag downstairs.

Then, sorting through the toiletry items to get down to one box under the vanity, taking a shower, a final round of taking clothes for the cruise downstairs so Margaret could make final selections for me…I’m terrible at making those decisions and she is quite good at it. If it turns out like normal, both of us could have taken half of what we took and we would have done just fine. The wild card is the weather. It could be a cold mistral wind blowing in from Provence or hot. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Once the packing was finished I cleared off the guest bed, went through the two roll-a-board camera bags to select the things I wanted to bring, charged the batteries and stored the stuff I wasn’t bringing in a safe place. Now it was time to go to the shoe store to pick up some new shoes. That went smoothly and, back home we started going through last minute preparations, making sure that everything outside was properly stored.

Next we got the bag packed for Spencer, our miniature poodle as he would be staying with our off-site dog watcher Gigi. the food we were taking on the trip was ready to go and last minute things like cancelling all the Comcast recordings was accomplished. Gigi came by to pick up Spencer as I was stepping out of the shower. She got a tour of the house and garden of our new Carmel house and Spencer jumped into her car to go to his “summer camp” with her dog Josie and her two huge cats. He seemed resigned and happy enough with his plight and he’ll come back a pound lighter due to all the walks she takes them on and fewer treats.

Of course, there were last minute things to do and Margaret realized that her white lightweight jacket wasn’t anywhere in sight. I realized that it had been in the golf cart and was in a box at the other house labeled “Golf Stuff” so we loaded up all the bags in the Mercedes and took off and stopped at the house on the way and picked up her jacket.

We ran into some traffic on the way to the airport so we ended up going directly to dinner at the Marriot. We sat next to people drinking and swearing like drunken sailors so the waiter moved us and gave us free corkage for the Law Estate Audacious wine we brought from home. Margaret’s steak was “still kicking” rare but they fixed it and we finished with a great dessert with a latte. We drove to the hotel, parked the car in the underground garage, took all our bags to the room, had a glass of wine and crashed.

The last 6 weeks we have packed up our big house in Reno (a very serious and large project!), sold a car, bought a car, bought a condo in Incline, moved stuff from the Reno house into storage for the condo, packed a 26 ft Uhaul truck to the max, drove it to Carmel, unpacked the truck and, along the way binge watched about 10 episodes of Baggage (sad but true, Jerry Springer and all, but if you want a good laugh watch a couple episodes).  All that baggage inspired us to take a trip.

And, it just so happened that Regent had a fantastic deal on a 15 day cruise in the Mediterranean.  Turns out that they have a brand new ship called the Explorer coming out in 2016 and it’s inaugural voyage is very similar to one that is taking place this May.  Apparently enough long-time Regent cruisers like us decided to book that trip and that left some excess capacity this year.  So, they had a sale (about 50% off) for this year’s cruise and we jumped on it, knowing we would need to relax after all that crazy packing.  Here is the itinerary (Updated after the trip to include every day and our return).

The amazing thing is that the cruise included about 8 places that we had never been.  And, who could complain about going to Saint-Tropez, Portofino and Cannes twice in 15 days?

We start the trip on Sunday by driving from Carmel to San Francisco, staying overnight by the airport and then departing on an American/USAirways plane to Barcelona via Charlotte, SC, arriving at 8 am.  After staying over night  in Barcelona we depart on Wednesday at 6 pm for a well-deserved relaxing two weeks.

We’ll try to give you the flavor of the places we visit through words and pictures and we hope you enjoy our trip along with us.

Dale and Margaret