UA 525 BOS IAD 0939 1120 739 2A

So the B fare gets an instant upgrade, so I didn't have to
sweat that. It's only an hour, blocked at 1:40, so potato
chips and a glass was all one could expect. After the flight
I hustled to the Turkish lounge to catch lunch, which was
chicken stew with onions and tomatoes, a decent kofta, and
basmati, along with a lot of stuff on the salad table, the
star of which was the smoked baba ghannouj; I had three
servings of this.

The dessert table offered rice pudding and pistachio baklava,
both good examples. As the bartender was absent, I had a decaf
espresso that was perhaps insufficiently decaf. Luckily he
came by eventually and poured me a Courvoisier.

There is supposed to be wi-fi, but in several visits I've
never been able to log in to it, so to do the FIDO and e-mail
I went down the hall to the Lufthansa business lounge, where
the Internet worked okay and a chipotle chicken on ciabatta
with cilantro-lime crema was unobjectionable. Plus the pour
here is Martell VSOP.

UA 915 IAD CDG 1720 0655 772 21K

This was my first official experience with United's premium
economy. It's 2-4-2 like the old business class with somewhat
less nice seats than any business class but slightly nicer
than coach. It's enough for me, which is good as this is about
all I'm likely to be able to afford in the future.

This section features bigger screens than in coach (11" opposed
to 8. something like that), so almost useful to me, but Channel
9 was on! so that kept me amused for pretty much the whole
flight.

Dinner was a Thai chicken in coconut gravy that I'd sampled
before in business class, with a salad of nappa cabbage and mango
with sesame ginger dressing into which had been introduced some
basil chiffonade (weird). Dessert was a white chocolate cranberry
cookie (grossly oversweet) followed bqy Villa Dolce lemon sorbet
(not quite grossly sweet). There being no Courvoisier, the flight
attendant offered Amaretto di Saronno, not quite the same thing,

There was a pre-landing breakfast consisting of a business-class
style fruit plate, abundant and good, and coach-style Rice Krispies
with milk or Chobani vanilla, of which I tried the latter, making
a poorman's version of a marshmallow treat.

We landed early, immigration was a snap, and they had a room for me
at the Ibis, though it was smoky and I had to change; even with
that I was showered and in bed by 8.

Lilli came in many hours later, and we set off for Chantilly (her
idea). This involves either backtracking to Paris and returning
out on the train or taking the bus to a bedroom community called
Senlis and then waiting at the station for the Chantilly bus. We
did the latter. It took a while.

The bus let us off at the head of the street where our hotel was,
only there was no announcement and no street sign. The bus stop
is called Mairie (City Hall), but there is no mairie within
eyeshot - it's half a block away. We got off at the right stop
but didn't see anything and accosted a bunch of people before a
sympathetic but monolingual woman told us that we were in fact
on the right street.

And so we came to the Best Western Chantilly, which is notable
for not having a sign out front, but eventually we found ourselves
in quite a nice room in quite a nice hotel.

After stowing our stuff, we walked around the town, checking out
the menus at the fancy restaurants and then past the Hippodrome
(oldest race course in Europe) and the Museum of the Horse and
then back through the park that dominates the city.

We retreated to the hotel bar, where Lilli got a glass of Ch. La
Croix Rouge Lalande-de-Pomerol, which was notably ordinary and I
a Biere Gustave, a local brew that did its best to be a Belgian
but thankfully not quite succeeding, after which I returned to the
apparently ubiquitous 1664.

Lilli didn't want to eat at the hotel restaurant, how pedestrian,
so we went down to a place we had seen on our travels, the
Histoire 2, a self-styled gastrobar from which we would have been
happy to taste the fruits of either the gastro or the bar.

Lilli, sticking close to home, had a burger with Comte cheese
(sort of Swiss-like), which came juicy and rare and good with
lots and lots of fries and a pichet of Cotes du Rhone. It was all
pretty good.

I got the menu of the day, which started with a pretty decent foie
gras maison, only the maison was in an industrial park someplace,
sided with a beet greens salad with mustard dressing and fig jam.

Then were ravioli, also industrial but cute and tiny and filled
with a manageable amount (read half teaspoon) of ricotta sided by
another salad, this time with ham.

I finished with probably the most industrial creme brulee on the
planet and a glass of Cognac - charged for a Hennessy, but who
knows what it actually was - it seemed to be the Canadian Club
equivalent in brandy.

And so back to the hotel, where bed was good - 12 hours good.
Lilli started us off on a lazy foot, and we lolled about until
I had to go out to the front desk to negotiate a late checkout!
I assured the manager that we'd be eating at the hotel restaurant
Le Cob, which we did.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
* Origin: Fido Since 1991 | QWK by Web | BBS.FIDOSYSOP.ORG (1:123/140)