Kit-Kats?

I'm just back from a short business trip to visit one customer and to make one sales call. I flew from Hartford to Louisville, had an all-day meeting in Louisville on Tuesday, flew to New York on Tuesday night, went to a sales call Wednesday afternoon, took the train to my parents' house, where I stayed Wednesday night, and drove home on Thursday.

My meals went something like this:

• Monday lunch: Two Kit-Kats in the car on the way to the airport, then a slice of really bad pizza at the aptly named Last Resort in the United/US Airways concourse of the Hartford airport. The Last Resort is one of the few holdovers from the bad old days of airport food - unappetizing, unhealthy, overpriced, and generally dismal.
• Monday dinner: A grilled cheese sandwich and Cajun fries from Five Guys in the DC airport. Five Guys looks like the East Coast version of In-N-Out (the best burger chain in the world), with a cheerful assembly line of people making burgers to order, and where the "grilled cheese" is just a cheeseburger without the burger. I had mine with tomato and fried onions, and it came off the griddle dripping with some kind of grease, but it was absolutely delicious. The fries were dusted with some kind of reddish seasoning, and they were yummy too. But note the absence of any vegetables all day.
• Tuesday lunch: Cheese, tomato, and lettuce sandwich from the buffet at the customer meeting, a characterless pasta salad, and a bag of potato chips. There are some places where it's harder to be a vegetarian than others.
  
• Tuesday dinner: A "Caprese" (apparently pronounced "caprice") sandwich at Quizno's in the Louisville airport while waiting for a much-delayed flight to New York. I've found that if you add hot peppers to any toasted cheese on bread, you can generally eat it.

On Monday night I slept in a Courtyard by Marriott that was fine in all respects, except that the thermostat didn't work, so I had a choice between constant heat or no heat on a sub-freezing night. Many people say the most important thing in a hotel room is the bathroom. For me, it's a distant third, at best. First is the bed. And second is the heating or cooling system, because you also don't want one that wakes you up every time it turns on at night.

On Tuesday night, after landing at LaGuardia at 11.45 pm, I slept on the couch of a college roommate in his apartment in Manhattan. Curtis has lived in the same apartment for about fifteen years (I lived in the same building for two years in the late 1990s), even though he now works for a hedge fund. That's one of the things I like about Curtis. And his alcohol collection, although I didn't find the collection of high-end Scotch until the morning. So instead I had Southern Comfort on the rocks while I looked out his windows at the skyline.

I can't be done with travel soon enough.