Text 3246, 84 rader
Skriven 2010-10-30 16:15:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: trip 671
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I bribed my brother to drive me to BWI by offering to buy
him a steak. He said he was in a fish mood, and after some
back and forth we decided on Gunning's, which is this
dive bar cum crab house in a strip mall that happens to
serve decent food at upscale prices. It's a bit of a shock
when you open the menu at this slightly dingy place and see
main courses running $20-35. Sandwiches are available as
well, though, and these price normally.

My brother had his usual appetizer, buffalo wings, which
here are amazingly sour and hardly hot at all - I can't
figure what kind of hot sauce they're using; anyhow, I
don't like it. The wings themselves were not frozen but
sort of tough anyway. The last time we were here, he got
broiled fish, and they cooked the heck out of it. I told
him to order it medium-rare, so he did. Broiled flounder,
just perfect, huge, a great plate of food.

I asked for oysters on the half shell but was told that
the restaurant doesn't get them until October.

Being in a crab house, I ordered a strip steak mooing.
It came very rare, almost as rare as I wanted. Being in a
crab house and feeling slightly funny about this, I asked
for a blob of crab imperial to be put on top ($8 extra) -
this was extremely mustardy but made with good lump crab,
with only one crab crunchie, which was gigantic and easy
to find, no crunching required.

Yuengling.

I got to the airport mighty early (as I was counting on
getting the earlier flight). The best the agent could do
for me was 8F, but there still showed empty seats in
First, so there was hope.

As I was leaving the desk, a couple who didn't speak
English were being dealt with quite gingerly - it seems
they had bought a ticket on united.fr from BWI-MCO, but
that ticket turned out to be invalid because their credit
card was turned down (but I saw their confirmation - it
said confirmed, what was that all about), so they had to
buy another, but US made them go back to UA, et cetera et
cetera et cetera. I translated as best I could with my
mixture of idiomatic Corsican from 1960 and Trouvere talk
from the 13th century and what I know from Escoffier and
the Asterix books. I hope they ended up in the right city
on the right day, but I had a plane to catch so couldn't
wait to find out. Security took less than a minute.

Went to the desk and asked the agent if I could have
something in row 6. He said, would row 1 do? I swallowed
my disappointment and smiled a big old smile. Actually,
1CD on the 320s have a little cutout, giving maybe a
couple inches extra foot space (not legroom, exactly).

UA 357 BWI ORD 1515 162O 320 1C
was  UA 473 BWI ORD 1706 1812 320 1B

I think they meant for Ch9 to be on; unfortunately, the
audio wasn't working except for Ch1 and 10.

A willing and cheerful crew; not much catering - a USAir-
style snack basket with worse food than US serves. Okay,
Biscoffs are good, but the nuts - King Nut premium mixed
nuts - were weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. Rancid,
too. Courvoisier helped.

My seatmate was intermittently fairly chatty; I discovered
that she was at the end of her career doing some executivy
thing someplace for some big company that didn't appreciate
her, not that she needed more money, but she wanted to cut
down on the hours, and maybe she would retire and work as a
vet tech or teacher's aide or something, and her husband was
a pilot at Boeing and was going to be delivering some of
the first 787s to All Nippon early next year.

We landed half an hour early, which would have been fine
but for the fact that my next flight wasn't for a while,
and the Chicago club isn't anything to write home about.

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