We don’t take American Express

Omar’s, the cheap steakhouse, takes American Express, but the expensive chichi restaurants don’t seem to. I like to pay with my Starwood American Express card because I get 1.25 airline miles per dollar spent and there’s no annual fee. My backup is the United Mileage Plus First Card MasterCard, which has terrible customer service and costs $60/year. I was going to get rid of it, but now that American Express and Diners Club have doubled their commission of foreign transactions from 1% to 2%, I’m keeping at least one card that has a 1% transaction fee. Ironically, that’s the FirstCard, which was the first to outrage their customers by announcing a 4% transaction fee on foreign purchases, which they have since backed away from. I also have the American Express Platinum card, but the $300/year fee for that is rapidly losing value to degrading customer service.

We eat at Monet tonight at dgolds’s suggestion. It’s a French restaurant in a house on the hillside near the Shakespeare Center. We have booked a table outside in the garden, but when we get there we ask to be moved inside because of insects and heat. No problem. The chef’s name is Pierre, of course. His wife comes to the table and recites the long list of specials. There are at least 10, and by the time she is finished I have forgotten half of them. I hear other tables calling her over for a refresher course. We order a delicious escargot, the special gazpacho (after I check to make sure there’s no cilantro in it), and I have noisettes of lamb while Hunnybear has salmon. The salmon is just OK, but everything else was great. The servers all wear little French berets. Very cute. Dessert comes around on a tray, and I am disappointed to learn that there is no ice cream. I’m the kind of guy who likes a little ice cream on whatever I order for dessert, but Pierre doesn’t make ice cream and refuses to serve anything he doesn’t make himself. A nice dinner, but at those prices—$107 for two service included—I thought it would have been nice to take American Express. But these French artists...what are you going to do?

The show tonight is Henry IV, Part 2, and it’s done outside in the Elizabethan Theater with men playing all the roles. This show must have been the inspiration for modern-day movie sequels like Speed 2: by intermission there is no discernible plot and we are falling asleep. It seems to be an attempt by Shakespeare to satisfy Fallstaff fans with more of his antics. We decide to go hhome and get a good night’s sleep in the tractor beam bed in preparation for the Dash-8 flight home tomorrow.

Next: The bluest skies I’ve ever seen aren’t in Seattle, at least this summer.