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 #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.

With the new US tariff regime looming people have been rushing out to buy things ahead of anticipated price increases and empty shelves. While some of my friends rushed to stock up on food several weeks ago I held off. It didn't make sense to me to buy 6 month supplies of beans, rice, and fresh fruits (to freeze).

For one, food is a small part of my budget, so if prices go up 25%, it'll be annoying but not a crisis problem. Two, food is demand inelastic so I don't anticipate major market disruptions like supermarket shelves going bare for 3 months because producers exited the market en masse. Three, I don't even have a place to store 6-month supplies, especially frozen stuff. To make it meaningful to buy a 50-pound box of avocados, like one of my friends suggested, I'd also have to buy an extra freezer to store them in. Plus a larger house to store the extra freezer! 😱 And four, I don't enjoy 6-month-old frozen food as much. I'd rather swallow the price increase than swallow bland, dried out food.

Now the tariffs are on pause, so there's more time to plan. ...Well, most of the tariffs are on pause. Trump has singled out China for punitive tariffs. I don't see that having a huge impact on food, though. Tariffs on Mexico will hit food broadly, because we do get a lot of food imports from Mexico, especially fruits and vegetables. For importing such things from Asia, the economics don't pencil out. Thus there are only a few, narrow categories of fresh food we import from China. There are more processed foods. Oh, and garlic. At least buying a 6-month supply of garlic is more reasonable than 6 months of avocados.

Georgia Travelog #7
Pooler, GA - Tuesday, 8 Apr 2025, 5:30pm

The first few times I saw depictions of a grocery store named Piggly Wiggly in films and writing I figured it was a joke. I mean, nobody would actually name a chain of groceries like that, right? Especially with the slogan Shop the Pig! It had to be a gag from some popular movie I never actually saw, like Caddyshack or something, that went viral— well, 1980s viral— and popped up in various places as a pop culture reference/joke.

Well, nope. As I'm sure people from almost half the country are raising their hands to tell me, Piggly Wiggly is really a grocery store. And there's one in Pooler, Georgia, where we're staying and visiting my sister this week.



A quick bit of searching shows that Piggly Wiggly is no small-town joke, either. Well, maybe it's in small towns but, as a quick bit of web searching shows, it's got almost 600 stores spread across 19 states. The store was an industry leader, too. It's considered the first self-service supermarket, innovating the modern concepts of checkout lanes and price stickers tagged on every individual item*— back in the 1910s!

Well, here I am 110 years later, and I've just Shopped the Pig. My sister and I swung by there for a few groceries after we finished Afoot in Savannah, Again! this afternoon. We tried Publix first, which is geographically more convenient to my hotel/her house and is a bigger, more modern store, but I was disappointed with the poor quality at Publix. Yes, they're big and look fancy, but all that selection at Publix is actually just 17 varieties of bland White people food. Piggly Wiggly wasn't much better for variety but its down-home vibe better matched the selection. And it was noticeably cheaper for similar items, including brand names. So, yes, I Shopped the Pig and Saved!

[*] Younger people might wonder how price stickers tagged on items was an innovation. The scanners we're all familiar with today that optically read UPC codes (those bar-coded numbers) on a packages only became standardized in the 1980s. That's when the technology capable of doing that, and manufacturers all printing UPC codes on packages, become commonplace. Prior to that merchants would put price stickers on every single item in a store's stock, and at checkout the cashier would quickly key in those prices at the register— which was basically just a big calculator that tallied up the total.

When I was in Panama a few weeks ago I bought a few bottles of Ron Abuelo rum. Ron Abuelo is Spanish for "Grandpa's Rum", and it's the marquee brand of rum made in Panama. For less than $25 on sale at the Rey mini-supermarket even in the small town of El Valle I got a boxed set of two bottles of Ron Abuelo 12-year aged rum.

I thought about it over the course of a few days before making the purchase. We were making daily trips to Rey to grab food, so it wasn't like there weren't multiple opportunities. But was it a good enough opportunity? I wondered. It was about $24 for a set of two 375mL bottles, I thought. That compares to about $36 for one 750mL bottle of Ron Abuelo 12-year at Total Wine back home in California. I finally decided, "Enh, I'll save one-third and buy it here."



It turned out I was wrong. I was wrong but in a good way! The boxed set wasn't two 375mL bottles, it was a 375mL bottle of special 12-year rum plus a 750mL bottle of "normal" 12-year rum. (I quote "normal" because 12-year aged rum is already upper tier rum.) Together these would cost $60 even at Total Wine in California, so I saved more than half off the price.

And how do these rums taste? I don't know yet! I've yet to try them. Maybe I'll save them to try with friends at our combined birthday party next weekend... or maybe I'll sample them quickly before that and enjoy them with friends a week from Saturday! 🥂😋

A few months ago... or maybe it was a year+ at this point, I'm not sure... Hawk and I were straightening the pile of shoes in our hall closet, and I found a pair of footwear I didn't even remember buying.



They're hiking shoes. Not hiking boots, but hiking shoes. When did I buy these? I wondered. I couldn't remember! So I stuffed them back in the closet— except in a more orderly fashion than the pile of shoes that was in there, because that's what we were cleaning up— and promptly forgot about them again. 🤣 Until today.

Today, for whatever reason, I remembered these shoes were in the hall closet, sitting there almost certainly never used for who-knows-how-many years. So when Hawk was feeling well enough to want to do a light hike today (she's still not fully over traveler's diarrhea after two weeks!) I figured it would be a great opportunity to try out these hiking shoes. That's because while the trail we picked, at Bxybee Park on the bay in Palo Alto, is too easy to want to wear hiking boots, the gravel paths made me want to wear something a bit more protective than my Keen sport sandals. Even with their toe cap the sandals still pick up small rocks on gravelly trails.

"I don't even remember when I bought these," I mused out loud as I laced them up in the hallway. "Maybe a few years ago at REI when I saw them on a clearance sale and figured, 'Why not try them?'"

"I think you bought them fifteen years ago, at Footwear Etc.," Hawk countered, name-checking a store that used to be around the corner from us but closed up years ago.

Well, regardless of when or where I bought them I could easily surmise why I'd bought them. While I've never bought hiking shoes before, always preferring either the sturdiness of hiking boots or the light weight and breathability of hiking sandals, for the right price I would've taken a chance on trying hiking shoes. And today, finally, is the time to try them!

Update: By the second time I'd worn them they fell apart! 😡

Panama Travelog #20
El Valle, Panama - Wed, 25 Dec 2024. 4pm.

We've continued taking it easy today as I recover from overextending myself on a hike yesterday. It's Christmas day, anyway, so a lot of things are closed. Even some hikes are closed. For example, there's a small hiking loop behind our hotel called Square Trees (árboles cuadradros) but it's closed today. There's a locked gate on it. Well, if we can't go hiking, then... as a notorious 1980s Barbie doll would say... let's go shopping!



Okay, it's not shopping, it's sightseeing. But now that we're not focusing on going somewhere we have time to stop and smell the proverbial roses here. Then we went shopping.

"Shopping" in El Valle means going to the Sunday market. I'm not sure why they call it Sunday market, as it's open 7 days a week. It's a combination farmers' market and arts and crafts vendors selling stuff for tourists. Places like this usually scream "Tourist trap!" and so I avoid them. But as I looked more carefully past the bright colors and touts and shills I noticed that in many of the stalls the vendors were crafting their crafts. Like, they were hand-painting wood carvings to hang in their booths for sale. That's huge, because it turns this from a tourist trap— where crap made in factories in China is sold at ridiculous prices to ignorant foreign tourists— into an actual artisans' fair.



We eyed a wood carving of a Harpy Eagle perched on a branch. We'd seen it the other day, too, but we're sure if it was worth the price. Now, knowing that it was hand carved and hand painted by local in the valley, we were ready to buy. And we did buy it— though at the end of the day so we wouldn't have to carry around a carving nearly 3' tall all afternoon!

The Harpy Eagle is a bird of prey native to rain forests in Central America. It is the national bird of Panama. I believe it had that designation long before the Bald Eagle was the official national bird of the US— which just happened, officially! Anyway, the Harpy Eagle, or águila arpía, lives high in trees in the rain forest and feeds on other rain forest animals like sloths and monkeys. It literally yanks them out of trees with its powerful talons, drops them to the ground, then flies down to eat.

I also decided to buy a Panama hat. Yes, the one I previously said makes me look a bit colonizer-y. There seems not to be a hangup about that like I imagined there would be.

In one of the artisans' stalls we noticed a Star of David on the wall.



The artist was cutting designs into metal earrings and pendants as we visited. Hawk noticed that several of his designs portrayed letters of the Hebrew alphabet. She noted aloud, "There are a lot of chais here"... and the artist responded, "Because nothing is more important than life!" showing he was purposeful about his artistic design. (Chai, spelled חַי in Hebrew, means "life" or "living".)

The man confirmed (when Hawk asked) that he is Jewish. He's a single parent with two sons who are also Jewish. They've had bar mitzvahs. "And today is not just Christmas, it's also Hanukkah!" he pointed out. He's right: Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, starts this evening at sundown. In fact, we noticed that when we came back around to buy that eagle from another artisan at 4pm, the jewelry crafter had already closed up his workbench and gone home to ready for celebration with his family.

Our Costco dividend check arrived this week. It's for $68 and change. That's disappointingly less than last year's nearly $114 but at least is still enough to more than break even on the $60 premium we pay for Costco Executive membership vs. the basic Costco Gold.



BTW, the way the $68 is figured is it's 2% of our purchases at Costco, excluding gasoline. I figure our dividend is way down this year because we didn't really make any big-ticket purchases. Though we do continue to shop at Costco regularly.

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.

One thing I've noticed as I've been periodically working on my Beer Tasting 2022 project— yes, it's still ongoing here in late 2024—is how popular premixed cocktails have become in the past few years. I'm judging that popularity by how much shelf space such drinks have taken over when I'm cruising the beer aisle at the liquor store and the grocery store. What used to be maybe half a rack of larger bottles of premixed cocktail drinks has now grown into 1/4 of the beer section. And, yes, they're sold next to beer because the category has grown and diversified with new producers selling them in packs of single serving cans.

I've long been skeptical of this category. I remember when wine coolers came out in the 1980s. At first they were made with real wine and fruit juice. The idea was create a lighter, sweeter wine-drinking experience, something like a wine spritzer drink for people who found the idea of table wine too intimidating. But within a few years the makers all switched from using real wine in their drinks to using using malt liquor, i.e., beer. Thus they also became a drink for people who can't handle beer and need it sweeter.

These "malternative" beverages always struck me as fake because most are branded to imply they contain wine or hard alcohol, when really it's just beer, sugar and artificial flavors. And the category has spawned real losers. Who else remembers Zima from the early 1990s? It launched with an enormous ad campaign. My friends and I in college tried it once. Once. Once was enough. It was downright disgusting.

And while wine coolers, Zima, and other malt beverages were advertised to be enjoyed by hip young men and women, they rapidly gained a cultural stereotype as being "girly" drinks— a thing young women, or girly men, would drink because they couldn't handle traditional wine... or even traditional beer unless it's sweetened up like Kool-Aid with sugars and artificial flavors. It's alco-pop.

Thus I mostly ignored the growing presence of canned alternative drinks in the beer aisle at the liquor store and the supermarket, kind of rolling my eyes as I strolled past to get to the real drinks instead of alco-pop. But then I noticed some of these new drinks are not just beer plus sugar masquerading as something else; some of them actually contain the liquor their branding implies!

The brand of this new type that caught my eye first is Cutwater. They're a liquor distiller based in San Diego. I'll say honestly that the reason they caught my eye is because they were on sale. Yes, I always appreciate getting a bargain! 😅 And seriously, the bright yellow "SALE!" tags are eye-catching. They're designed to be eye-catching.

A week ago I bought a four-pack of Cutwater's Mai Tai premixed cocktail. The label states it's made with two kinds of rum, actual rum as opposed to, basically, beer flavored to taste like rum. Cutwater has at least half a dozen different cocktail varieties on store shelves. I picked Mai Tai to try first because it's a cocktail I enjoy drinking but is a bit fussy to make from scratch. How often do you have orgeat syrup on hand?

So, How Does it Taste?

The question, "So, how does it taste?" can be answered a few different ways— all contextualized with, "...as compared to what?"

For a premixed cocktail Cutwater Mai Tai tastes pretty good. It has legit rum flavor. It does not taste like a beer-based facsimile. It's not a fizzy drink meant to impersonate a real cocktail. With 12.5% ABV it has a pretty good hit. One can of this is like 2 medium-strong beers or 3 lighter ones.

As a competitor to an actual Mai Tai, this Cutwater drink is barely even close. It's got a couple kinds of rum, which is on track, but then it's got fruity flavors. It's closer to being another tiki rum drink, possibly a Bahama Mama, than being a Mai Tai.

That said, as a generic tiki rum drink, it's pretty darn good. Think of it as a rum punch and there's no argument. Plus, the convenience of just opening a can and pouring over ice can't be beat. It's so easy to enjoy when going out to the pool or just settling down to watch some TV in the living room.