Dubious Quality

Detroit: Day 1

This will follow the format of other years, with plenty of detail at first, then dwindling as the week goes on and I get progressively more burned out.
***

"Seven dollars and forty-seven cents," said the clerk at the airport shop.

"Hey!" I said to Eli 14.0. "Airplane pun!"

"Oh my god," Eli said, laughing. "You idiot."

We had a surprise for Eli on this trip.

There were at least eighty people in the regular Delta line to check luggage. I steered him over to the priority line, though, which only had about fifteen people. "This isn't our line," he said. "This is for people flying first class."

"We ARE flying first class," I said.

His eyes popped out of his head in the finest Warners Brothers tradition. "WHAT?"

"Your mom and I agreed that since you've worked so hard all summer, and since it's the day after your birthday, you should get a one-time treat. Don't get used to it," I said,  laughing.

It was a treat for me, too.

I flew first class once about fifteen years ago when my boss gave me a bunch of her miles on a business trip. I didn't even care about the service--all I wanted was legroom, because on regular flights now, my knees are jammed into the seat in front of me. So to have a flight where I didn't feel like a giraffe stuffed into a suitcase was a real treat.

First class, of course, is unnecessarily ridiculous. Here's a picture of our breakfast:L



All this while they were shooting bags of pretzels out of a t-shirt cannon to people in coach.

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that we had signed up for TSA Pre, and we received our numbers in only two weeks. There were at least two hundred people in the regular security line, but the TSA Pre line had two people in front of us. Security literally took less than thirty seconds.

Sign up and take advantage of this before everyone else signs up and ruins it.

After we landed, we drove out to Ypsilanti (I think Pflugerville and Ypsilanti should be sister sisters, just for spelling purposes) to watch a machine-pitch baseball tournament for eight-year-olds (and one eight-year-old in particular who is a very good friend of ours now).

That was fun enough, getting to see him play, but there was an added bonus. Eastern Michigan replaced their turf with gray FieldTurf as part of a factory/manufacturing theme. We actually snuck on the field and threw passes for 15-20 minutes, and the field was so soft I could have napped on it. The gray is crazy, though, and here's a picture:


Tomorrow: first day of camp.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:08 PM