I used to be a wine snob

But since purchasing my retirement espresso machine [read: a machine that takes so long to make coffee, it is incompatible with working], I have found myself unable to drink "regular" espresso. 

Upon waking up in Boston at 5 AM, I discovered Boston is not New York. Coffee places not in my hotel [read: Starbucks] do not open until 7 AM. My slow walk took me past public art, the Greenway, and to the edge of China Town.

Finally, I arrived at my destination, Gracenote Coffee. If the Internet is to be believed, the home of Boston's best espresso. It's hard to judge coffee when one is jetlagged, sleep deprived, and caffeine deprived...but this was definitely a drinkable espresso.

Boston Coffee stop #2 seemed to be better set up for pourover. I'm not a huge fan of pourover coffee as it's never hot enough. After an 8 or 9 minute wait, I received a very delicious cup (and carafe) of coffee. It was  warm when I received it and quickly degraded to luke warm. I vowed to stick to espresso going forward.

Monday found me in a similar situation on the West Coast. Except with no walkable coffee places I was forced to choose between driving coffeeless in a now foreign city or drinking hotel coffee. I chose wisely and didn't crash on the way to Portora Coffee. Oh, they had donuts.

Finally on Tuesday I ventured to the sort of hard to find Stereoscope Coffee. They will validate parking, but I took the opportunity to take a walk through a short stretch of Back Bay.

Thngs that make flying much, much worse

1) Catching the last flight out of Maui. I keep swearing off red eyes, but if your destination is somewhere other than the West Coast, overnight flights are sometimes the only sensible option. 

2) Flying about as far as possible without leaving the country. My Eastern Seaboard geography isn't great, but Boston has to be about as far from Hawaii as physics allows. 

3) Give all of your legroom to your feline travelling companion. My neighbors needed help transplanting their 3 cats (apparently airlines only allow one cat per passenger). Aside from a moment of pure terror when I thought TSA was going to make me carry the cat through the metal detector (cats require a strip search and pat down to get through security), the lost foot space was my only cat complaint.

Keeping track of total travel time proved difficult with all the time zone crossings, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 hours (airport to airport).

Tradwifing

Sure I could have thrown a party when the family went to Honolulu for the weekend. 

I didn't even know we had an ironing board.

Mad pretzel skills

Cheddar beer bread