Trips Shouldn't Founder on Food

We stayed too long.

That’s surprising to me, because this trip was stretched to take every available day, and at nine days was only a brief part of the trip that it was standing in for, which was to have been a three week trip to Australia. Yet what we found was that after seven days, we began to grow irritable -- parents more than the child. A great deal of that was due to lack of what I’ll call ‘reliable’ food.

What we found there was that most of the food just didn’t suit us. It’s difficult to explain why -- it’s not as if the food was that of an alien race, and other visitors eat it happily -- but for whatever reason, we just couldn’t find food that we liked . Breakfast seemed oriented to people who liked small portions, delicately prepared. French toast, for example, was exquisitely made -- and each of the pieces of bread was about the size of two postage stamps. An excellent arrangement of berries, along with a large pot of creme fraiche, came along, so the presentation was artful -- but it was an appetizer. The ‘standard English breakfast’ sounded promising -- sausage, bacon, cereal, juice, muffins, coffee -- but the sausage was a massive, oily cylinder of meat (the casing; the inside was bland); the bacon was ham, in my terms; the cereal was effectively granola (from back when granola was just the province of Euell Gibbons), the coffee was industrial strength road tar, and the muffins were damn near cold. The juice was pretty good, though I found that if I hadn’t eaten anything, taking a gulp of it would knock my blood sugar down to my socks.

And lunch, and dinner, pretty much the same thing. About mid-week, we started looking for places that sold ‘real food’ that we might recognize -- Italian, for example -- and found some good stuff, but also surprises. Wonder exactly what kind on meat is in that ravioli? When the lasagna came, it had no sauce on it, and just a small decanter. By Friday, we had broken down to going to American places -- Mickey D’s, for example -- and even there, things weren’t quite right. My daughter’s McFlurry was smaller, the flavor was different, and the toppings were alien to her. My single hamburgers were lukewarm upon delivery. Dinner at Pizza Express was remarkable, because both times -- even though the meal was good -- I had to hustle downstairs to the john to barf. No idea what. And the pizza from Pizza Hut was disappointing -- smaller than expected.

Towards the end of the week, when we were both starting to feel a little nauseous routinely, we started to wonder if it could be the tap water. We weren’t experiencing the Trafalgar Two Step, but by that point we were eating so little, there weren’t many suspects left. So we just drank bottled or heated water. Did we have to? We have no idea -- but we were getting desperate. It was about day seven, and we felt the vacation slipping away. On Friday, we barely went out at all. We did what we could, not knowing what it was that was making us nauseous -- just knowing that it was something, and it was different than what we were used to.

At this point you might say well of COURSE its going to be different, and that what we saw was as close to being American and still be different as it was possible to be, and that’s true. And we didn’t make a Herculean effort to find good places to eat, so its possible that we passed dozens, hundreds every day. We just didn’t know how to find them, and having that question hanging over us each day -- are we going to find someplace decent today? -- got to be draining. It didn’t help that having this focus on food made us feel oh so American Tourist -- think pot bellied man with Hawaiian shirt and big camera. It wasn’t the way we wanted to be, but we didn’t know how to fix it.

We do now.

Next time, one suitcase will have soup, cheerios, and granola bars.

And the address of Kettners.