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bad burritos and a reluctant Neville
Sunday, March 1 2026
location: Room 244, Hilton Garden Inn Charlotte Airport, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
I'd taken diphenhydramine last night so Gretchen woke up well before I did this morning and was able to play her usual word games and do some reading before I was even conscious. Her cellphone was now consistently functional, indicating that whatever its problem had been, it was a consequence of being taken outside of the United States.
Gretchen was loving our room at the Hilton Garden Inn. It was big, had a nice big bathroom, and when she was showering, the various products were easily dispensed from push buttons on bottles attached to the wall. In all these ways, it was very unlike our cabin on the Star Clipper sail ship. Just before we left our room to catch the shuttle to the airport, Gretchen decided to watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show she has mostly avoided because of how loathesome she finds the character played by Larry David. But Kelly and Brian on the boat had been raving about it, so she gave an episode a chance. And it was very funny, playing out a lot like a Seinfeld episode. In the one we saw, David's character tries to get social credit for showing up at a party he doesn't want to attend by showing up the next day as if there had been a mistake. But, naturally, the ploy backfires spectacularly.
Then it was time to go. The shuttle was parked out in front but there was no driver, so we had time to get coffee from the breakfast area. Outside, the weather was nice, with temperatures in the 50s and plenty of sun. The ride to the airport took very little time, and the only glitch in getting through security was a small greenish quasi-rectangular rock I'd found on one of the Caribbean islands and had in my bag. It was flagged as my bag went through the x-ray machine, but once the inspector had seen it was just a rock, he had no further interest in it and I was able to keep it.
The main priority in the Charlotte airport was to get us something to eat, as we hadn't had a proper meal last night, hadn't had breakfast this morning, and would be flying through lunchtime with a provided snack at best. Charlotte is a nice airport, and seeing the rocking chairs (not that I've necessarily ever sat in one) brought up some good memories. There are lots of places with potential vegan food, and after walking somewhat past our gate and checking out all the options, we decided our best option was burritos from Tequileria, specifically the Tequileria Pronto, a quick-order offshoot next door to their sit-down restaurant. Gretchen noticed that the guy taking our order became noticeably nicer after she left him a $2 tip. Our burritos didn't feel especially heavy in the bag, but whether or not this was a good thing depended on how much we enjoyed eating them.
We'd picked a good time to get to the airport, as we were able to board our plane soon after getting our burritos.
The flight to Albany would be a short one, so it didn't really matter that we were sharing our three-seat cluster with a rando in the aisle seat. We started eating our burritos early in the flight and found that they weren't very good or very vegan. They were supposed to contain vegetables, but all they actually contained was rice, beans, lettuce, and shredded cheese that hadn't been mentioned in its description. (The burritos had been presented as "vegan," but can you really expect a minimum-wage-earning burrito artist to know what that means?) We were hungry, so we decided to act as if the cheese were vegan, and it was great that I still had some Baron hot sauce stolen from Mount Edgecombe to put on mine or I would've been really unhappy with it. The lesson of all this was: never buy anything from Tequileria, at least not in the Charlotte airport.
When we landed in Albany, we were decidedly back in winter (I'd seen the first snow from the airplane somewhere around Delaware), with temperatures in the low 20s. Because Gretchen's phone was working again, she was able to coordinate in detail with the woman driving our Subaru Forester up from Hurley to pick us up (she works with her father doing such driving). Gretchen had asked the woman if she liked dogs and, if so, could she bring ours up with her when she picked us up. The woman seemed excited to do that, but then it turned out that Neville refused to get in the Subaru, and when Neville didn't get in, neither did Charlotte. So she had to pick us up without them.
Humans are diverse in the Hudson Valley, and Gretchen doesn't have a lot of tolerance for people with mindsets much different from her own. Once she learned that our driver lives on a homestead farm with goats (likely the kind one eats and/or milks), she had little interest in chit-chat for the rest of the drive. So what little conversation happened was mostly with me. She wanted to know about the contraption on our roof, so I explained how it collected hot water by circulating antifreeze and also told her about the grief the building inspector had given us about it.
As usual, the snow seemed deepest and most unmelted right in front of our house. There was still plenty of snow from that big snowstorm of early January, and on top of that was another couple of inches from a five-inch storm that had passed through while we were in the Caribbean. The driveway was clear, though, and there was some icy tromped-down snow on our walkway. The dogs were delighted to see us, of course, and Gretchen spent some time with them on the couch before doing some of the usual post-vacation chores. It was early in the day, so I turned off the boiler and made sure the solar hot water system was in summer mode so it could heat our water once more. Eventually a downloaded a bunch of episodes of Jeopardy! and started the process of going through my photographs. Some booze and diphenhydramine ensured that I feel asleep early on the laboratory bean bag.
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