Summary
We had an uneventful trip home through Charlotte, then disaster. How long to fix this mess? Oh, well. Trip over.
Details
Checking out of The Blind Tiger was a little bit of guess work. They don’t have a front desk but rather have people there from 8am to 7pm or some such hours. Beyond that if you have an emergency they have a number you can call, or a phone number where you can send a message. You may get a fairly quick reply, then again… I had been meaning to ask how we check out, given all that and as our departure will be like 6:30 am. Thankfully I got an email that said, in essence, lock your room and put your keys into the cut glass bowl in the entry. Easy peasy.
The drive to BTV airport was easy, especially as we’d bought gas yesterday. 40,000 population and it being early on a Tuesday there was almost no traffic. Returning the car was easy, given the related small nature of the airport. Apple Maps said the Enterprise desk would be closed but there was a guy there, as chipper and cheerful as the caricature of a guy who rented us our car. Quite on brand for upbeat Vermonters.
We’re a bit apprehensive about our flight home after our shit show of a flight home from Milan earlier this year, where it took an extra day of travel. But here, at BTV there’s no line at the checkin/bag drop or at security. There are only like 14 gates at the Burlington International so there’s never a long walk to your gate. We independently grab coffee and something for breakfast and await our flight.
As I’m waiting in line for my bagel Karen comes over with a question. We’re automatically added to the “please upgrade me” line for business or first given my level in the loyalty program for American. They did that and have ONE seat available in first class. Do we want it? And Karen’s question, what should we do? Is this a trick question? Of course I let Karen have the spot and she seems excited. In the end the plane is one of those small Embraer regional jets. Two-two in coach and two-one in “First class”.
Our flight to Charlotte is a couple of hours and is uneventful. In Charlotte we find a few lounges and we have a tad over three hours so it’d be good to figure out a way in. At the Amex Centurion lounge my Amex card will get me in but for a guest it’s $50. Karen, feeling that fair is fair, suggests that since she got to sit in First for the BTV/CLT flight that I should get the lounge and she’s OK to sit in the departure area and wait for me. As if.
For our flight to Austin we’re back in coach. I don’t remember much about the trip so I guess it was uneventful. As we get closer and closer to home I periodically drop the temperature at home from 85 degrees to 84 and down and down. The goal is not to put the A/C into hyper “er ma gerd” mode but rather have a gentle glide path down to something more like 73 degrees. It’s 100° or better in Austin, a temperature range we’ve not experienced in a while.
As I summon an Uber for our ride home I’m shocked by the $60 price tag. That’s like twice what we paid a few years ago. At home we walk in and have the usual sniff sensing the air is stale. I’ve started putting a 1/4 cup of bleach in both toilets before we go but I’m not sure how much it helps. It’s a hell of a lot better than when I peed just before a month or longer trip and forgot to flush.
We flit around the now cool house and unpack, turn off the “we’re away” mode for our home automation, turn back on the water to the dishwasher. I drive the CR-V over to the post office to pick up the mail from our PO Box. I’m pleased that the car starts without requiring a jump like it did after our two month trip to Europe in the spring.
Back at home, as we do more unpacking, we hear a periodic CHIRP-CHIRP-CHIRP followed by a couple of minutes of silence. One of us and then two race around the house to be in the right place the next time the chirping starts to figure out what it is. Maybe some battery device that’s about to run out of juice. After eliminating all of the far flung corners of the house we’re back at the center of the house, in the kitchen, awaiting another set of chirps.
Ah, something in the fridge is beeping. We open the door and are smacked in the nose with the most god awful smell. Putrefying everything. In the fridge and freezer both. The light’s flashing and the two temperature readouts are still in the mid 80s. Ugh. I scramble to get it back going and we start the long process of disposing of every last scrap of everything from the fridge and freezer.
They say 90% of a lot of the stuff in food is water and it’s long since melted down and is sitting in a big fetid pool at the bottom of every drawer and the bottom of the fridge and freezer. It’s less than pleasant. I try cycling the breaker but to no avail. I kibitz with ChatGPT for an AI view as to what’s happened and how to get modern refrigeration back.
Short story long… it’ll be over a week before the Samsung Repair guy can get out here to figure out what’s going on. We do put everything into the outside trash and wipe down all zillion surfaces of the fridge multiple times with lysol.
Sigh. It’s good to be home. Trip over. Thanks for tagging along.
Photos
