Trip Reports - CLT-STL-SMF

I keep thinking if I wait long enough there'll be something about one of my trips worth talking about. This one promises to be the one!

Guacho - control your envy here..

The positive event was certainly not the flight here - it was pretty dreadful. But once here, I have had the pleasure of dinner with Jamester last night and am looking forward to dinner with Tom911 tonight!

Last night, Jamester and I went to a great little bistro called Enotria Cafe and Wine Bar. Absolutely wonderful! I had a breast of free range chicken, topped with cherries in a port wine glaze and a small portion of fois gras - yum! Jamester had a fish entree which I assume was equally wonderful, though my face was in my plate, so I can't be sure http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif The wine selection was great, and we chose a 97 Joseph Phelps Cabernet - big, berry, with strong vanilla overtones which was stupendous with the cherries in port wine.

Jamester is a great person and I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to meet him. Not only is he a great conversationalist and a true gentleman, he was most gracious to this old lady and the few hours we spent together was a real lift to a very exhausting week.

I flew out here on TWA - much cheaper and for Y you get F. As I posted on the TWA board (where I managed to start another war), I was pretty surprised that on a 2 hr flight from CLT-STL, I got a bag of pretzels in FC. The 717 was great, though. On the STL-SMF leg in an MD80, the dinner presentation was similar to coach - drag the big cart down the aisle, ask which entree you prefer, take the wrapper off, and plunk it on your tray - salad, entree, desert, all at once. The desert was ice cream, and was melted by the time I finished my entree. The roll was so hard you couldn't even cut it, much less bite it - no joke. After 50 minutes from the gate, the meal service was completely done and cleaned up! With repeated apologies to Aviator loyalists, I maintain it was the strangest meal service in First I've experienced.

*** skip to after dinner

Tonight I dined w/ Tom and tomorrow I have the 6:25 AM return flight.. breakfast should be hard to screw up at least.

Tom911 was another great FT friend I'm glad to have had the chance to meet. He took me to an unbelievable electronics store - Fry's Electronics - where I could have spent a week (but then all good southern girls would rather be in a hardware store than almost anywhere http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif ). I bought a new mouse and then we went to a local mexican restaurant where we had a great authentic meal. I splurged on a non-ethnic desert - a brownie sundae. Good thing Tom was there because it was enough for a family of four.

Tom has a great job which affords him enviable vacation time - which he uses for some equally enviable travel. It was fun to hear about some of his travels. We had a great time learning about each other. What great luck for me to have a chance to meet two such gracious gentlemen in one week! What a wonderful place FlyerTalk is... when I think of the lonely, boring times I've had on the road.... this is a great service.

Well - I can't wait to see what breakfast on TWA is like... later guys!

[This message has been edited by svpii (edited 12-08-2000).]

He took me to an unbelievable electronics store - Fry's Electronics

Those who shop at Fry's regularly might use the word "unbelievable" in a different context. While they have a selection of goodies that is hard to believe, the service (or lack thereof) is legendary.

The following link was created by a less than fan:
http://www.best.com/~braith/frys.htm

Pretty funny, Craig http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif Actually, the selection was impressive, but the checkout was a little weird in that you snaked around in this line (full of lots of temptations of course) and waited until a guy on a ladder told me to go to number 12...

The return trip was uneventful and predictable. Breakfast was french toast, ham, yogurt, muffin, fruit and I was pleased enough, given that it was 6:30 and I was starving. The STL-CLT leg was still only pretzels, which is still lame.

It's Saturday night and I'm tired... tough trip. Later all http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Originally posted by svpii:
Pretty funny, Craig http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif Actually, the selection was impressive, but the checkout was a little weird in that you snaked around in this line (full of lots of temptations of course) and waited until a guy on a ladder told me to go to number 12...


Fry's is an interesting Bay Area institution.
Salon.com has described it as the "closest possible thing to a sadomasochistic shopping experience there is.." because of the staff.
It is essentially a big huge geek supermarket. The checkout line is even geeky as it's a rather neat example of parallel processing.Fry's exploits massive parallelism pretty heavily by the number of people they have waiting to check you out. I can't recall a time when I've actually been in line for
more than 10 minutes.

JD

Frankly, the only thing worse than buying something at Fry's is returning something at Fry's.

Typically, 4 to 5 different pieces of paper and consultations with 3 different people are required.

But, you keep going back for more, like the monkey pressing the bar for coke.

Sad, just sad.

Greg