The holiday has begun well. We went to Gordon Ramsay's Plane Food restaurant in Heathrow Terminal 5 for a posh lunch. We toasted the start of the trip with lemon mimosas, which may now be my favourite cocktail - limoncello, fresh lemon juice, and champagne. Very Very tasty.
We each ordered a starter size of the wild mushroom orecchiette with a total of four sides of various vegetables: broccoli with almonds, rocket and parmesan, some kind of lightly curried carrots thing, and buttered seasonal greens which consisted of a couple kinds of cabbage. It was all incredibly delicious, but took a while to arrive. This turned out to be a good news, bad news situation. We had left plenty of time to catch our flight and had only begun to wonder what happened to our food when the manager appeared and was profusely apologetic about the delay. Apparently, the chef took issue with some underling's cooking of our broccoli and sent the whole thing back. It is entirely possible blows were thrown or someone even killed. In any case, he gave us a couple of glasses of very nice Pinot Noir on the house.
I had planned to sleep on the flight, but instead watched four movies: The Wrestler to prepare me for American culture; Valkyrie to make sure I was briefed on European history (or at least the one bit of it that Americans know about); Milk because it was set in San Francisco which is where we were headed; and the Watchmen because its got a character who gains super-powers when something goes wrong in a physics lab.
This last is particularly relevant as we are staying at the Stanford Guest house right next to the longest linear particle accelerator in the world. I’m very optimistic about something going terribly wrong which rends space and time and results in my having the ability to smell with super-human accuracy or see using other people’s eyes.