In-Law-a-thon – One…Maybe Blog Name Should Be de-Travel Catastrophe?

On Thu Mrs. De-I and I headed out to start the In-law-a-thon (three siblings, four states, in 10 days). Our first stop is her youngest sister who lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. I have been on a roll lately with my last two trips being wonderfully benign from a travel perspective. I thought that karma was going to give me a nice respite from all the problems of this summer. I should have known that it was an anomaly.

Our first flight from Albuquerque to Denver was without problem and quite empty. Our flight in Denver was ready and waiting and pushed back on time. We were on the runway when the pilot says that bad weather was going through Minneapolis and that we were on a 40 minute ground hold. 10 minutes later he says that the hold is up to an hour and half and he’s going back to the gate so people don’t have to just sit on the plane. The entire wait ends up being 3 hours. We get into Minneapolis at 4:30 rather than 1:30, just in time for the evening rush hour.

People complain about O’Hare in Chicago but I find Minneapolis to be a very annoying airport to go in and out of. The baggage carrousels are very tiny and when there are three flights disgorging at one carrousel at the seam time, it is chaotic. Getting our rental car we drive out into the traffic. We hear these strange sounds that we found out later are tornado-warning sirens. Then the rain hits. It’s a downpour. One of those rains where you can barley see ahead of you while your creeping down the road at 25 mph. We only had to go through one underpass where we thought the car might stall. It took about twice as long to get to GP2 house. We went out to a local Italian restaurant that Wife had researched that turned out to be very nice. The caprese salad had good tomatoes and nice fresh mozzarella with just a light wash of dressing. I had a main course of Salmon cooked with artichokes and olives in a light wine and tomato sauce with spaghetti. It was different from anything I’d had before in that the fish was cooked with the spaghetti and sauce en papaillote, or encased in a paper (or in this case aluminum foil) tent. When it was served they cut the tent and slid out the dish onto the plate. Wife and I shared a bottle of a nice Valpolacella as the GP2’s don’t imbibe.

We got to our hotel pretty late and crashed.