Back Home for the Fourth

I am just back from a week in the US where I took care of a few appointments and pieces of business, enjoyed some time in New Hampshire, and spent the long holiday weekend with the whole family.  It was really wonderful to be together again.  

I spent most of the 3rd in Cambridge and managed to fit in a play at the American Repertory Theater.  It is their new musical Gatsby based on, well, obviously, The Great Gatsby and destined for Broadway.  I found the staging clever, the music good, and the performances great.  (I thought the set suffered from being too busy and distracting, but that was sort of a minor point.)  I think The Great Gatsby is a profound book, and its themes of the corruption that comes with privilege, the rapaciousness of self-interest, and the decay at the core of the American Dream, seemed particularly relevant in our current cultural (political) milieu.  It is set a few years after the Great Influenza, and, of course, those references resonated as well.  Seeing it on the eve of Independence Day, though, seemed a little too on-point.  

For dinner on the 4th, we had (most of) my sister's family and our dear friends Maura and Chris and their family joining us for dinner.  It was a group effort, with me doing much of the shopping and meal prep, Shannon doing the grilling, and the girls all chipping in.  We snacked on chips and onion dip as we worked.  We grilled steaks from Half-a-Penny Farm and shrimp skewers, cooked corn on the cob over an open fire, and oven-dried two baking sheets of tomatoes.  We ate very well and finished the evening with a lemon polenta cake (baked by Meg) and a wild blueberry galette (baked by Shannon) for dessert.  It all tasted delicious but also felt so comforting and familiar and nostalgic---just what one would want for a July 4th celebration, especially after a year of rillettes de canard and pains au chocolat, delicious as they may be.

The trip was short but afforded time to hike up two mountains in the Belknap Range (bringing me closer to my Belknap Range hiking badge), swimming and kayaking in the lake, tennis and cornhole, some lovely sunsets, a Netflix romcom, and lots of just hanging out. 

The trip did have a lowlight, though.  I decided to save (a very small amount of) money and fly back on a new Icelandic airline through Reykjavik.  I have written several papers on the practice of add-on pricing (also called junk fees), but Play Airlines could have written the book.  They charged for every bag beyond a personal item as well as all food and drink served on the trip, including water!  I would not have imagined that an airline would have the chutzpah to charge $3 for a bottle of water on a six-hour flight.  The add-on pricing was annoying enough, but also frustrating were the services that were not offered at any price.  Obviously no WiFi, but also no outlets to charge devices, no seat-back video (or any video, for that matter), no plane tracker, no blankets or pillows, no in-flight magazine.  All of these amenities are sort of expected on long-haul flights, so I was not prepared to have none of them and spent the flight cold and bored.  Oh, and it left from CDG Terminal 3, which is a pretty crappy terminal with minimal food offerings.  (The Uber driver asked me to check three times to make sure that I was actually leaving from Terminal 3.) 

Here we are coming in for a landing in Reykjavik. 

In terms of basic operations, the airline seemed fine.  And my flight back was much better because I was prepared for the lack of amenities.  I had a pizza and a glass of wine at Logan before boarding, and I brought a sweater and a sweatshirt in my carry-on, as well as a number of TV shows downloaded on my iPad.  But I don't think that Play Airlines will ever be my go-to for transatlantic travel.

I am now back in Paris and looking forward to making the most of our final weeks here.