Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Italy Travelog #29
BCN Airport - Saturday, 31 May 2025, 1pm

We landed at Barcelona airport a few hours ago. It's where we're making a connection on our trip home from Sardinia today. The flight here was easy; just a boring 90 minutes in an airplane. The leg home to San Francisco from here is a lot longer. It'll be a whopping 13 hours.

We're on the ground for a few hours in Barcelona so we've taken a tour of the airport, from one end to the other. That's not just because we have time to kill or because we want to stretch our legs before being packing into cramped airline seats for another 13+ hours; it's because we have to. Our arrival gate was at one far end of the airport, while our departure gate is at pretty much the opposite end.



As we cruised around BCN airport we found that it has a few outdoors patios. It's nice to have an opportunity at an airport to get outside for sunshine and fresh air. So few airports (*other than tiny ones) have outdoors spaces once you're behind the security cordon.

Alas, while these patios at BCN offer sunshine they don't exactly offer fresh air. That's because they're smoking havens. And the smokers are fucking pigs. Despite there being ashtrays every 5 meters the floor is basically one big ashtray. You can barely set a foot anywhere without stepping on cigarette butts.

The purpose of our exploration wasn't just to find our next gate. It was also to get lunch. BCN has a lot of places to buy a meal in its big central concourse. That's especially true if your idea of a meal is, "I absolutely love ham and Swiss, please show me 17 variations on ham-and-Swiss sandwiches!" 😅 Alas, Hawk doesn't like ham, and I don't like Swiss. That knocked out, like, 80% of the restaurants.

We did find two restaurants that served food both of us could enjoy. One was an airport-typical world-fusion restaurant with options that seemed fashioned to middle American tastes. We decided that would be our fallback restaurant if we couldn't find anything actually interesting. Then we found a Spanish cafe in one of those outdoor patios that sold a variety of empanadas.



Hawk picked a pair of veggie empanadas (left in the photo above) while I picked three different types (right): one chicken, one beef, and one pulled pork. We also split a plate of fries not pictured above. Oh, and I enjoyed a mug of German beer that wasn't heinously expensive. At US airports such a beer would often cost $15 nowadays.

Instead of beer being heinously expensive, you know what is? Sodas.



In a convenience store near our gate I spotted these soda and beer prices. A bottle of Coke is €4.59; a can of beer is €3.99. And that's no crap beer. That's Estrella Reserva 1906, a beer I've bought several times at home and found to be one of the best overall beers I've found. Granted, the beer is a smaller serving than the soda, at 330ml vs. 500ml. Still, it's a flip of the norm in the US to see any single of beer selling cheaper than a single of soda.

Another thing that struck my US eyes as odd today was this:



So, ham, particularly jamón Ibérico, is a big thing in Spain. Lots of stores at the airport are selling it. But this one is bold enough to insist that it's the best in the airport.

Best in the airport? Sure, I could believe that. It's way more plausible than one of their competitors claiming to have the best ham in the world. I mean, I'm not sure where the best ham in the world is but I'm pretty darn sure it's not in an airport. 🤣

Italy Travelog #23
Chia, Sardinia - Thursday, 29 May 2025, 8pm

Eating dinner surprising takes a lot of planning in Italy. Especially as an American with American habits. Restaurants virtually all close after lunch and don't open again until dinner. And dinner is late. A few restaurants start at 7pm. Many don't reopen for dinner until 7:30. And you often need reservations. Especially for dinner, as most casual restaurants, the kind where reservations aren't required, don't even serve dinner. They close after lunch. So if you want dinner out, you've got to plan ahead and wait.

It's extra hard out here in Chia on the island of Sardinia where there aren't even that many restaurants. Other than the few onsite at the hotel, which are all expensive and have tiny menus— each has, like, one thing Hawk could eat— there's one other restaurant nearby. It's spendy and also has, like, one thing Hawk could eat. After that the next nearest place is a taxi ride away. Except there are no taxis here. And a private car costs €45. Each way. Even just to go a few miles.

We ended up buying a few things at the small grocery store a few minutes' walk from the resort and enjoying a picnic dinner on our patio. Oh, but we had to go quickly, because the grocery closes at 7pm.



The photo shows the two kinds of sliced meat I bought, sliced cheese, bread, and wine. The cheese is pecorino sardo, a local style of pecorino. The bread is focaccia. And the wine is Cannonau, a locally grown grape that is actually an ancient clone of Grenache/Garnacha. Most of it was pretty tasty. One of the two types of meat was overly dry.

On our way out to the store, when we were discussing the limited dining-out options with the hotel concierge, I remarked that waiting until 7:30 for restaurant seating was unusual to me because most Americans eat dinner earlier. She explained that Italians normally eat dinner as late as 9:30. To them, she explained, 7:30 dinner is early because people who work in stores only close up at 7. They have to go home and start dinner or go back out to eat.

It's an interesting explanation that points to a cultural difference. In the US we think of the service industry as there to serve us. In Italy it's more recognized that the service industry is "us"; that it's normal people working jobs in retail, and they need to live their lives, too.

Italy Travelog #19½
Chia, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 2pm

Oops, this blog got lost in my backlog. I'll post it now, slightly out of order. Wednesday after our cave tour at Grotto Is Zuddas we were taken to a restaurant a few miles from the hotel where we were promised cibo tipico, typical (local) food. Local cuisine, according to two people I heard from earlier in the day and yesterday, surprisingly is not heavy on fish. That's surprising because Sardinia is an island so it's, well, surrounded by fish. But recall that historically, residents never settled close to the coast because of frequent raids by pirates and foreign powers. So it was a bit surprising when we sat down to a preselected menu that was all fish.

The all-fish thing was even more surprising because two people in our group of 8 had specified "no fish" on the planning form asking for dietary restrictions. Oh, and 1 needed gluten-free... and the menu was all fish and pasta.

Obviously something broke in the chain of communication from us to the organizer to the restaurant. But to make it worse, the restaurant had difficulty understanding why anything was wrong even when we communicated it repeatedly. I've read that food allergies are poorly understood/unappreciated in European countries relative to the US. I mean, there are still plenty of people in the US who think food allergies are bullshit but they seem to be a minority now, and restaurants pretty much all know how to handle dietary restrictions. It was morbidly interesting to see this play out in real life. The restaurants staff just didn't get it.

The first challenge we had to overcome was English-to-Italian. Only one staff member, the manager, acknowledged speaking any English. Next, the manager, when confronted with news the food allergies, initially was combative. He told us that the menu was already chosen and the food was already prepared.

We pushed back, noting that, "Hey, you're a restaurant, you must have other food you can serve us instead." After some discussion their counter-offer was pork chops instead of seafood. That worked for one of our no-seafood group members, but not Hawk— whose dietary restriction list began with "no pork, no seafood". Obviously they hadn't gotten that memo. Or they decided it was just bullshit from childish picky eaters who need to be taught the two options at the dinner table are "take it or leave it".

There was also the gluten-free issue to resolve. The restaurant did have gluten-free pasta, it turned out. Or at least a different-shaped pasta they said was gluten free. I'm skeptical about that because I watched the waiters scooping food from one plate to another and back again. If you know anything about food allergies, you know that transferring items from one plate to another with common utensils is a no-no. Upon seeing that I lost all trust in the restaurant's ability to take our needs seriously and advised anyone with allergies not to eat.

Somehow Hawk did have an allergic reaction. I think they served all of us half plates of gluten-free pasta. It was hard to tell what it really was. Regardless, something in the pasta or sauce triggered an allergic reaction for Hawk. Fortunately it was a mild one that she was able to treat by taking a Benadryl pill. But actually getting ill from the food at the table put the final nail in the coffin of having any enjoyment at the restaurant.

Italy Travelog #5
Rome - Saturday, 24 May 2025, 9pm

After we checked into our hotel just after 3pm there was plenty of time left in the day. For us it had already been a long day. 4pm Saturday is 7am Saturday in San Francisco. With the time changes we'd basically been up for most of 24+ hours, with only a nap of 2 or 3 hours on the cramped airplane flight for sleep. But even a little sleep is better than none, and the summer-y daylight in Rome helped us wake back up this afternoon.

We made reservations for dinner with the help of the hotel concierge and then walked out to the nearby plaza for a bit of shopping, about half a mile away.



A few things struck me about the convenience store in the plaza. One, it had fresh fruits and vegetables and meat and bread. ...Okay, it was more of a small grocery store than a convenience store, but for something the size of most US convenience stores it had more than just prepackaged crap, hotdog- and taquito rollers, and a beer cave. And two, while it didn't have a beer cave it had some surprisingly cheap wines. I could've bought a likely decent Italian table wine for the equivalent $2.35. Instead, though, I just bought a bottle of beer and some cookies for after dinner plus a can of soda for the next morning. It was definitely better to buy the soda for 0.95€ here than 8€ back at the Waldorf Astoria.

Speaking of the Waldorf, we went back with our bags of shopping before dinner. It would've been nice to combine the trips into a single outing, but restaurants around here don't even open for dinner until 7:30! We did our shopping at 6, and the little plaza certain wasn't interesting enough to hang out in for 90 minutes. I mean, we did look around since we had time. It's the kind of place you're done with in 5 minutes.

So, we chilled back at the hotel for an hour then walked back out, straight through the plaza again, to the restaurant the concierge had recommended, Da Luciano.

What sold Hawk on Da Luciano was— aside from the fact it was the first restaurant the concierge suggested that didn't involve the words "The menu is mostly fish" (since Hawk doesn't like fish)— was homemade pasta. Nonna makes all the pasta fresh in the morning. And to go with the pasta they have both fish and not-fish. 😅



The concierge also told us the white pizza on focaccia was a can't-miss. We didn't see a focaccia white pizza on the menu. ...Yes, I speak enough Italian— or at least enough pizza-Italian— to parse the words in Italian on the menu. So instead we took a flyer on a basic margherita pizza as an appetizer. OMG it was good! Hawk even liked it— and she hates most pizza.

The margherita pie was a good pick as an appetizer. It was light, sweet, and savory all at the same time. And the cracker thin crust— "It's on matzah!" Hawk quipped— was light and tasty. It left us plenty of room for our secondi.



Hawk ordered a plate of gnocchi. The potato pasta is her go-to pick in Italian cuisine. And hearing that it was homemade here was the key thing that go her excited to go. And Nonna's gnocchi did not disappoint. Hawk quickly pronounced it the best gnocchi she's ever had.



My secondi was veal saltimbocca. On the menu it's "Saltimbocca alla romana", but yeah, it's veal pounded thin and sauteed in a pan with ham (prosciutto) and a white wine based gravy. BTW, saltimbocca is a fun word. It means, literally, "jump into the mouth".

The saltimbocca was positively delicious. Yes, things were jumping in my mouth. 😂 I don't know if I can call it "the best I've ever tasted" like Hawk's gnocchi, though. I mean, I can, but that's a meaningless comparison as this is only the about the 3rd time ever that I've had saltimbocca as it's not common in US Italian restaurants... or the few times I've seen it on the menu it's been hideously expensive so I've tended to pick something else. This dish was I think 14€, so quite a bargain. And yes, of the 3 total meals of saltimbocca that I've had, this was at least tied for the best. 🤣

Now it's about 9pm and we're back at our hotel room. We're sitting on the balcony, having just enjoyed the sunset. I figure I'll go to bed by 10am as we'll have a busy day tomorrow touring in Rome.

I mentioned recently that March 2025 has been a great month for over-achieving my New Year's resolution to try new restaurants in the area. Y'know, that New Year's resolution from... 2023. 🤣

About 10 days ago I was coming home from a client meeting in San Jose and was trying to figure out where to grab lunch. My Plan A had been to get lunch with the customer, or at least with my sales colleagues, but everyone else had places they wanted to get to quickly. And frankly I had to get back in reasonable time, too, as I had a string of afternoon meetings to join. I looked to see what restaurants were along my driving route. I was just about to settle for one of many familiar chain restaurants when I saw another option: a pizzeria that specialized in personal-sized pizzas. I love pizza— I mean, look, I have a tag for pizza, and my Apple News app offers me "Pizza" as a news topic— so I decided to give it a try.



While "Pizza California" sounds like it's another chain restaurant— and the well-branded exterior kind of looks like a chain restaurant, too— it's not a chain. It's a one-off pizzeria that's apparently been in San Jose's Berryessa neighborhod for almost 30 years. While that's not exactly my home turf I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this joint before!

Pizza California is vaguely similar to those Chipotle-style pizza chains that have popped up everywhere in the past 10 years. Y'know, the ones where you specify your pizza one topping at a time while a worker assembles it behind a plexiglass divider. Pizza California is like that except you don't walk down the assembly line watching your burrito pizza get made. You order at the cash register, and someone in the kitchen, out of sight, makes the pizza. Oh, and they have beer. A lot of beer. It was lunchtime, though, so I stuck with a Coke Zero Half-Caf from their Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.



The pizza came out about 10 minutes later looking pretty darn good. I got a combo pizza, a set of about 5 common toppings—or, as New Yorkers would call it, a garbage pie. One thing about a garb—combo pie is that with all those toppings it can be challenging to balance the cooking. Pizza California baked it right. The cheese was properly melted and the toppings were just slight crisped but not charred.

Would I go back? Yes... but I'm not sure when. The pizza was great, and I love being able to get a quality, custom-made pizza in personal size. Plus the selection of a dozen or so beers on tap makes it interesting for an evening visit. But the location is at the edge of how far I'd drive for a casual meal by myself. I'd totally swing by for lunch again next time I visit the customer whose office is nearby. But go out here just for the pizza? Not very often.

Wednesday this week was a busy day, work-wise. I was out and about on the Peninsula visiting a few customers. I met at one customer's offices just before 10am for a couple of meetings, took them out to lunch nearby, then drove up to Redwood City to meet another customer for a couple of meetings, then took them out to dinner. It turned out that both meals were at Greek restaurants!

Lunch in Santa Clara was at Opa!, a new-ish branch of a restaurant that's been around in Silicon Valley for a while. I don't remember if I've eaten at one of the their sister restaurants before. If I have, it's been years. Thus this counts for my Try New Restaurants New Year's resolution from 2023. 😂

Opa! feels like a high-concept chain restaurant. The decor is upscale and modern yet looks a bit too... pat... to be unique. It's not really a chain, though. There are only 3 of them. The menu is decently broad, spanning all the standards you'd expect to see at a mid-scale Greek restaurant, plus a few crossover dishes like the "Greek Philly Cheesesteak" that one of my colleagues ordered. It was huge, BTW, and he said it was great.

I ordered the Greek meatloaf, one of the house specialties. It was pretty good. I mean, how great can meatloaf be? It was moist, came covered— but not drenched— with a mild tomato sauce, and sat atop a serving of slightly too-creamy mashed potatoes and a few pieces of wilted spinach. The only reason I wouldn't order it again is because I'd like to try at least 3 or 4 other things on the menu before doubling back.

Also tasty looking was the grilled flank steak with feta cheese. That was my #2 choice, and one of my colleagues ordered it. He had no complaints about it, but my concern looking at his plate was that it was just a piece of meat with a small sprinkling of cheese. I guess if you're doing a carnivore diet that's perfect, but if you're looking for a square meal it's missing a few sides.

Speaking of sides, I also ordered a few appetizers to share. Saganaki was served alight, which thrilled all 5 of my colleagues, none of whom had ever seen it before. Opa! We also shared a plate of dolmas. They were disappointing. They were very fresh, but inside the freshly rolled grape leaves they were just rice.

Price-wise Opa! was on the spendy side of what Hawk and I usually do for meals out together. The tab for our group of six was about $240 all-in, so $40/head with tax and tip and non-alcoholic drinks. The qualify and presentation of the food seemed fair for the price, though, so I could see us going there together every once in a while.

Dinner in Palo Alto was at Evvia. Yes, it was Greek twice in one day. That happened because I picked the lunch spot while a colleague of mine picked dinner and apparently didn't notice the overlap. Or maybe he just really wanted Greek and was jealous because he couldn't attend lunch. 🤣

Evvia has been a well regarded restaurant in tony Palo Alto for a long time. I'm not a go-to-fancy-restaurants sort of person— except when the company's paying 🤣— so I'd never bothered to try it. But I was also curious to try it on OPM.

Evvia's dining room has a classy feel without being pretentious. We were seated outdoors on the covered patio where things felt a bit more casual. Heat lamps blazed away making it actually too hot despite cool evening air in the 50s.

The food at Evvia was all very good though not distinctive. Nothing made me say "Wow!" And the saganaki was not served alight. Disappointing. Maybe it's a fire code thing with the tented patio?

Surprisingly Evvia was not that spendy. I mean, it was more expensive than Opa!. And if you go deep in the extensive wine list you can add hundreds to your tab. But the braised lamb shank entrée I ordered was just $40. I didn't see the final bill (a sales VP paid) but I figure the average cost for a meal and shared appetizer and non-alcoholic drink would come to about $70pp all-in. Order heavy like the VP did, though, with lots of appetizers and two nice bottles of wine, and... well, I think the bill for 5 people topped a grand. 😳

I could see going back to Evvia with Hawk. It'd be in our splurge range though not a crazy splurge. As not-crazy-expensive as it is I wished I'd tried it on my own years ago.

Non-Vegas Vegas Weekend Travelog #1
Henderson, NV - Fri, 14 Feb 2025, 9pm

After 4½ days of work meetings wrapped on Friday afternoon it was time to shift gears. I shifted from being in Las Vegas and ignoring all the glamor and gambling for work, to being in Las Vegas and ignoring all the glamor and gambling for leisure! Instead of me flying home Friday evening I had bought a ticket for Hawk to come out and join me. And it was even Valentine's Day.

"Wait," you might wonder, "Don't you mostly ignore Valentine's Day?"



Yes, I do! The main thing I've done on Valentine's Day the past several years is go to work. And that's partly because my company nearly always schedules SKO on the week of Valentine's Day. I guess they get a cheaper rate or something as other companies are trying to give their employees a break by not scheduling mandatory offsites that week. Mine even ridicules Valentine's Day as fake holiday.

It's a good thing Hawk and I agree. 😂

But even so, just because I roll my eyes at Valentine's Day doesn't mean I want to stay at work on Valentine's Day. Especially on a Friday after a long week! I skipped out from a post-meeting round of drinks with my department head at 5:05pm and boarded a Lyft car to the airport.

At LAS I met Hawk in the baggage area. Her flight had landed 10 minutes earlier. We scooped up our large bag once it hit the conveyor belt, called another Lyft car, and rode to our hotel for the next 3 nights.

We're totally off-Strip for the weekend. We're out in Henderson, at a Marriott Residence Inn. The closest thing to gambling around here would be trying the runny scrambled eggs at the breakfast buffet in the morning. 🤣

For dinner this evening we walked to a Mexican restaurant a block or two away. The walk was actually more than we bargained for as the temperature was dropping and wind was gusting. Oh, and the sidewalks out here aren't meant actually to be used. But the food was good. We both enjoyed the dish of guacamole we split as an appetizer. It was as good as our best homemade. And when they brought more out with her taco she set the remainder of first dish aside to take back to the hotel. I had quesabirria which was way more filling than I expected, so I took some of that back, too, to save for breakfast tomorrow.

We're back at the hotel now, and I'm crashing hard. Even though it's only 9pm I'm not too surprised as it's been a hard week for me. I haven't gotten to bed before midnight or gotten more than 5½ hours of sleep a night the past several days. So, going to sleep at 9:30? I'm due.

Panama Travelog #24
El Valle, Panama - Thu, 26 Dec 2024. 9pm.

In my previous blog I said I'd start posting one-a-day entries from our trip to Panama to speed things along. Here I am now, just one entry later, and I'm going to break that cadence by posting a second daily entry. I didn't even last one day. 🤣



The reason I'm breaking stride is that we've just had an amazing dinner here in El Valle. How ironic that it was only on our fourth and final night here that we figured out how to do this. Instead of solving for "What's most convenient and doesn't look terrible?" we decided to search TripAdvisor reviews with a cuisine in mind. Hawk found a well regarded Mexican restaurant that wasn't far away. Actually it was in a neighboring hotel that was so swank it made us sad all over again about the bare-bones, false-advertising place we got stuck at.



After a round of drinks and an appetizer of guacamole, our main dishes— platos fuertes, they call them in Panama— arrived. Hawk ordered two steak tacos. They came beautifully presented on a plate and with plenty more guacamole, which she loves.

Meanwhile I'd ordered a full order of birria tacos....



What landed was more like a quesadilla— and a humongous one, at that. But that was okay because what was on my mind tonight was, "Hmm, what I really want tonight is a quesadilla"! It was delicious. And it was so big I could only finish half of it.

After dinner we drove back to our dumpy, disappointing hotel. We made our usual after-dinner stop by the Rey supermarket. Rey is a chain here in Panama and is far-and-away the nicest "mini-super" in El Valle. We've gone shopping every evening to pick up a few drinks and snacks. Why every evening? Because our Spartan little hotel room doesn't even have a fridge! So every evening I've bought a bottle of soda, a snack for dessert, and two bottles of beer. Fortunately mini-supers in Panama all sell beer by the individual bottle. And Rey has an amazing selection of singles available. Even better, the single bottle price is basically just 1/6 the price of a 6-pack. Trying buying a single normal bottle of beer at a fair price in the US.... You literally can't!

I was told, in paternalistic tones, by a store's district manager when I challenged them about that once that "Selling single bottles promotes alcoholism." Sure, 7-Eleven, keep selling your refrigerated 18-packs. That's not promoting alcoholism! 🙄

Trade Show Travelog #7
Back at the hotel - Wed, 4 Dec 2024, 10:45pm

I'm back in my hotel room now, shoes off and smoky clothes tossed in the closet. Day 3 of the AWS trade show is in the books.

My day started not with the trade show but with doing some customer-facing work from my hotel room. Sales leaders don't appreciate that I'm busy with a trade show they sent me on that I expressed a preference not to do. They still want to move other business forward, and every day counts to then. It's not good enough to have a meeting on Friday, when I'm back from travel; it has to happen today. The fate of the entire company rests upon it, they'd have me believe.

After the totally-could-have-waited-2-more-days work I dressed for the show and walked over. I'm staying at the Wynn now, so it wasn't a brutal walk. I worked the booth on the show floor from 1-6pm. In the past I used to do 6-8 hour shift with minimal complaint... but this 5 hour shift today had me checking my watch halfway through. By the end of the day almost everybody in the booth was grumbling about their aching feet/ankles/legs. ...Everybody except the money-saving genius who decided to forego the carpet padding because it cost extra. Said genius was barely in the booth today, of course.

This evening a bunch of us went to dinner at Sinatra in the Encore hotel/casino. It was an easy "yes" for me because the Encore is connected to the Wynn, where I'm staying now. And also because I enjoy Italian-American cuisine. And that's despite eating there last night, too. In fact some of the waiters and the sommelier recognized me. I made the dinner less repetitious by ordering the veal osso buco this evening instead of the (ginormous) veal parmigiana. The flavors of the meals are as unalike as apples and oranges, but between the two I think the osso buco was the better choice.

Well, like I said, I'm back in my room now. For the night. I have no interested in clubbing or hitting a bar. Drinking too much is a younger person's sport. And I have no interest in gambling anymore; all the games on the Strip suck now. Even watching the ploppies piss away their fat stacks of cash on games with terrible house edges is no fun. It's like cattle walk ploddingly to the slaughter.

Tomorrow will be the last day of the show. I'm scheduled 10-1 but may work as late as show close at 4. My flight's not until around 7pm. I'll see if I can stand-by to an earlier flight. Meanwhile, I should close my computer up soon and try to get more than 6 hours sleep tonight.

Thanksgiving '24 Travelog #6
Falls Church, VA - Tue, 26 Nov 2024, 9:30am

The hotel we're staying at for our 4 nights in Virginia, the Hilton Home2 Suites in West Falls Church, is new and overall pretty comfortable. One thing a lot of travelers like about hotels such as this is that a breakfast buffet is included in the rate. Before you European friends of mine say, "Of course!' and "Yes, that's tasty," remember this is an American breakfast buffet. A complimentary American breakfast buffet. That means instead of fresh eggs, deli meats, cheeses, and baked goods it's stale, sugary carbs and other prepackaged crap. So while while many of my fellow Americans book hotels such as this because they fancy themselves living the high life gorging on that "free!" buffet, Hawk and I booked this hotel because every room comes with a kitchenette— including a 3/4-size refrigerator. We picked the hotel because that would make things easier to buy and eat our own groceries!



So indeed our first order of business Sunday morning (we arrived late Saturday night) was not to go downstairs to the breakfast buffet on floor 2 but go all the way down to the ground level and head over to the Giant Food supermarket a few blocks away. We bought drinks and snacks for the room as well as simple breakfast foods. Well, maybe not all simple. Hawk bought a tray of freshly rolled veggie sushi. 😋 I bought a jar of pickled herring, a few bagels, and a dish of cream cheese. Yes, I could literally get a bagel and cream cheese free from the buffet if I wanted... but I could tell the bagels in the supermarket were better than anything I was likely to find at a hotel breakfast buffet.

Monday morning I decided to check out the buffet to see how good of a choice we'd made. Indeed there were free bagels and cream cheese. I tried one of their bagels.... It was surprisingly way fresher than any bagel I've had at a similar hotel. But the ones I paid 89¢ each for at the supermarket were still way better.

I'm glad we picked the hotel where I can buy a better bagel.