Overnight flight from Miami to Frankfurt, sitting in the last row of the next-to-last section, just by the galley where, when the flight attendants weren't banging carts, passengers were stretching their legs and vocal chords.
9 a.m. breakfast in Frankfurt - all the tables around us held tall glasses of beer, delivered by a cheerful waitress from Thailand.
Arrived in Warsaw at 1:30. Hania's new brown suitcase was the first to fall onto the luggage carousel. It had bright new ribbons I assumed were tied by TSA after they opened it and found nothing suspicious inside.
Her cousin Jurek and his wife Monika took us to their apartment in Muranow, a block from the new Jewish museum. I carried Hania's heavy suitcase - no elevator - up to the third floor. We were shown around the apartment, then Hania went to get something from her suitcase which, it turned out, was not her suitcase. So I carried the heavy thing down two flights of stairs and we all drove back to Chopin Airport as if having quickly decided Poland wasn't for us.
Inside the airport we explained the problem to the man at the information booth. With a wry smile, he gave us a number to call. Shortly, a man in a tie appeared and walked us through a passageway that led back to the luggage carousels. He disappeared into the lost luggage room and reappeared with Hania's suitcase. We gave him the one we had taken.
The next morning we woke up to sunshine, turned on the radio, and heard a man singing: "Vamos a la playa."
I had dinner the other night with a fellow travel writer who had recently taken her niece to Key West.
"There were all these Russian girls on bicycles," she said.
I told her about the story I wrote several years ago about the Eastern European workforce on the island. But she had noticed something I hadn't.
"The way they ride bicycles," she said with awe. "No American girls can ride bicycles like that."
Travel writing has moved from metaphors to hashtags.
If you read the airfares in the Miami Herald Travel section you see that one airline, identified by the letters NK, has consistently lower fares from Fort Lauderdale than almost any airline to the same destination from Miami. Checking the codes, you see that NK is Spirit Airline.
Last month, I flew Spirit for the first time, to Boston. At check-in I was asked to pay $50 for my carry-on bag. It was the only bag I had. I paid $50 for the same bag on the flight home. When I complained about the deception to the gentlemen at the gate, I was told that, had I purchased my ticket on the Spirit website, I would have been told about the extra fee, which increased my total cost by almost half, and made flying Spirit more expensive (who doesn't travel with a bag?) than other airlines. And of course, there is nothing on the airfare charts about this hidden fee.
This past Sunday I spent a few minutes wondering what the NK stands for and then I decided: Not kosher.
I recently met a man who told me that, some years ago, traveling in Tasmania, he was asked if he was Canadian. This surprised him - he was from Ohio - and he asked the man what made him think he was from Canada.
The Aussie explained that, when it came to English-speakers with North American accents, he always asked if they were Canadian first, even though the odds were greater that they were American. The reason, he said, was that Canadians get offended if mistaken for Americans, while Americans are never offended when mistaken for Canadians.
In 1998, when I was the travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, I wrote a column, "Of course, we only buy it for the travel," the conceit of which was to regard the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as a travel magazine. I claimed that it educated young Americans about the world, and had probably given Bill Clinton early inspiration for his later involvement in foreign as well as domestic affairs.
So I was not at all surprised yesterday when this year's swimsuit issue arrived with a full-page ad for the Travel Channel's "Sports Illustrated: The Making of Swimsuit 2013."