I didn't want to go to Paris. I have already been in Paris this year and that, I thought, was enough. I CERTAINLY didn't want to go to Paris with the Mullings Director of Standards & Practices who would, as she has for the more than 30 years we have been married, keep me in line by giving me THE LOOK any time I tried to give a French taxi driver a history lesson (World War I, World War II, the Marshall Plan, etc., etc.)

Nevertheless, collegial obligations being what they are, we ended up in Paris for the wedding of a colleague.

On the way over we had a routing that took a Great Circle Route from Washington, DC to Paris, France: Washington Dulles to Cincinnati, Ohio; Cincinnati to Paris. It's a Great Circle Route if you're going to Pluto and need a gravity assist from just one more revolution of the Earth; but otherwise it's a little out of the way. Pluto, by the way, would have been only slightly MORE convenient as a place to have a wedding, but then we had made my family schlep to Ohio which isn't that far from Pluto either, if you're starting from New York.

Nevertheless, the MD of S&P and I had both worked during the morning, then met at home shortly after noon so as to finish packing and drive the 45 minutes to Dulles Airport in time to catch our 4:35 pm flight.

While we were driving to the airport, this was the approximate conversation:

She: Did we use miles?
Me: No.
She: Why?
Me: I don't remember.
She: Are we flying non-stop?
Me: No, we're going through Cincinnati.
She: Why?
Me: I don't remember.
She: Are we in coach?
Me: Yes.
She: Why?
Me: I don't remember. Look, I bought these tickets a long time ago; I think when the groom was still in high school and he's in his 40's now. I believe I booked this routing to get the best price; which is why we're not going non-stop and not going through either Atlanta or JFK; and, until last week we still weren't sure we were going to actually TAKE this trip, so I didn't want to fiddle around paying $200 each time I changed something.
She: I still don't understand why you didn't use miles. Don't you have a lot?
Me: About 200,000. I'm saving them.
She: For what?
Me: I don't remember.

Not only that, but before we had left the house I did something which frightened me beyond words: I packed a container of nuts to eat on the flight.

The thing about people who bring their own food on airplanes is this: No one has ever - EVER - died of hunger on an airplane. With the possible exception of those rugby players who crashed in the Andes and had to ... had do ... well, it ended up with a bumper sticker I saw once which read:

Eating your own food on an airplane is like playing gin rummy to pass the time. Only old people do these things.

I had gone to the Sutton Place Gourmet and bought Macadamia, Cashew, and Hazel nuts. I opened each plastic container and emptied one into a soup bowl. I took a handful of each and put them into the now-empty container, and started to mix them.

The nuts spilled all over the kitchen counter.

So, I got a salad mixing bowl and poured all the nuts into it thinking I would blend them in that bowl and then pour the appropriate amount into a plastic container for the airplane.

It's really amazing how many nuts one of those plastic containers ... contains. Enough so, when I poured the contents of all three into the salad bowl, once again it was nut city on the kitchen counter.

So, I brought out the heavy artillery: A mixing bowl big enough for preparing bread for every sailor on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. I put ALL the damned nuts into this baby, climbed in after them, mixed everything together, scooped enough out to fill one of the plastic containers I had started with, climbed back out, and then ... this is the part which scared me ... I Scotch Taped the container closed.

Here is the final result:

I'm going to buy a deck of cards soon, and a fanny pack to put them in. I just know it. I have become my own grandfather.

Delta Airlines, like every airline except Jet Blue and Southwest, is losing money. Lots and lots of money. The reason airlines are losing money is because of the Internet. Every person can click on Orbitz or Travelocity or some similar website and compare routings, fares, and times between any two cities on the globe.

Being able to do that means you can decide whether it's worth saving $75 on US Airways for a flight which leaves a little earlier or later than you wanted; or flies into Long Beach instead of LAX, or whatever.

It has the effect of making airline travel a commodity and commodities tend to find the lowest price point for any given circumstance.

To help keep themselves - well, not afloat, but in the air - airlines have taken to changing from being an endeavor competing on services and schedules to competing as if they are a commodity - on fares alone.

Following 9/11 airlines began to cut back on their schedules. The days of being able to fly from any point in the US to any other point on an almost hourly basis are gone - probably forever. Not only have they cut back on schedules, but many airlines have gone to using more small regional jets on more routes.

I believe there are no more full-sized jets on Delta between Washington Reagan and Dallas-Fort Worth. Three-and-a-half hours on a small plane - even a jet - is too long.

All that to say that the flight from Dulles to Cincinnati was, indeed, on a regional jet. The flight is only about an hour so it is not terribly uncomfortable and, as we were booked in coach anyway, I didn't sit there for an hour stewing over the fact I had paid for a business-class seat and here I was sitting around people who had only paid for coach, had only EVER paid for coach, and wouldn't know how to act in first class if they happened to fall into an empty seat there.

Have I ever mentioned that I am a travel snob? No? Hmm. Well, there you are. Coach seats and my own container of nuts.

Regional jets are airworthy and, one assumes, the pilots are perfectly well qualified to fly them. But I can't see the pilots so I am comfortable in this myth. I can, however, see the flight attendants, who, to be truthful, don't always measure up to what you see on a real airplane.

On this particular plane we got Skippy the Flight Attendant. Here is a photo:

Note the spiky air, the sideboards and the look of keen intelligence in his eyes. There was a time, in the early days of flying, that flight attendants had to have nursing degrees. The qualifications have changed since then. In fact, I'm not certain that very many years have passed since HE was nursing.

Regional jet seating is two and two. The row in front of us was occupied as follows: Four college-aged kids; a boy in the window seat to the left, a girl on the aisle to his right, then two more girls in the aisle and window on the right side of the plane.

The three girls obviously knew each other and were on a trip to Las Vegas. The boy did not know them, but really wanted to know them and so adopted that college-boy-pseudo-intellectual-smarmy thing that they do, and which they do about one decibel too loudly.

One of the girls was reading Catch-22. The boy asked what it was about. She said it was a book about World War II (which is like saying the Odyssey is about a boat trip). He said he didn't like books about World War II, but he liked books about the Vietnam War. He was reading a book about werewolves. Maybe it was about a werewolf who found himself in Da Nang. Go figure.

I was going to insert myself into this discussion by saying to the idiot that Catch-22 is an American classic by Joseph Heller who wrote it about World War II but was, in reality, an anti-war book which was released, and avidly read by college students, during the Vietnam War.

But I didn't because as I was inhaling to give this guy a brief lesson in American Lit. I happened to glance to my left at the MD of S&P who was winding up to give me THE LOOK so I sat back and glared at the back of his seat in unrequited knowledge.

I finally got to him as we were landing and one of the girls on the other side pulled the combination Air-Sickness-and-Seat-Occupied bag out of the seat pocket. Great hilarity ensued amongst the girls over the multi-lingual explanation of this bag's purpose including the usual euphemisms. Finally the kid - overwhelmed by a need get back into the conversation - said, quite loudly, "Vomit."

This was followed by one of those college-girl-sideways-looks-at-each-other-what-is-it-with-this-goofball things rather than the gales of laughter he was expecting.

It was also followed by a pretty good poke in the shoulder by me with the instructions: "That's enough, Sparky."

I didn't look over but I can guess at what the MD of S&P was aiming my way.

[Next: Arrival in Cincinnati then Across the Pond!]

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