Friday, 5 September 2025, Tallahassee to Edinburgh

Written 27 September 2025

On the road again! And, coincidentally, on our 54th wedding anniversary.

So now we're off on another Tauck land tour, this one to England, Scotland, and Wales, which will be followed by a few days on our own in Paris, to round out our usual three-week trip. We start in Edinburgh, for which we set off today.

Our trusty travel agent is rewarding us, for our loyal use of his services, with complimentary limo service to and from the airport. As usual, you can't get there from here, even going through Atlanta, so we're flying TLH to ATL to New York JFK and from there to Edinburgh.

The tour actually starts at 1 pm on Sunday, so we're flying in a day early so that we don't have to step straight from the airport van onto the tour bus after flying all night.

David considered checking in with the airline by phone in advance, because he had read that, along with medallion status, frequent-flyer miles, and cost of ticket, order of check-in was factored into the decision of who to bump from oversold flights if no one volunteers. I pointed out that Delta was almost certainly not going to bump a Platinum Medallion Million Miler sitting in Comfort Plus (or even his travel companion). So we didn't bother.

The limo appeared on time, and the drive to the airport was smooth, so had lots of time to sit around waiting for our on-time flight.

When we checked in, David wisely arranged to be met by the airport wheel-chair service in both ATL and JFK. And a good thing, too, as both involved long treks between gates, which would have been very slow and uncomfortable for him in the Star Wars storm-trooper-style surgical boot you see him modeling here. I was a little sorry we hadn't asked for a second wheel chair for me—those guys probably push chairs 30 miles day, so they are fit If we hadn't been slowed down a couple of times by traffic jams, I'd have had trouble keeping up. The pace was, shall we say, brisk.

We had lunch at the Blue Moon Brewhouse (closest to our gate), where David had a passable cobb salad, but my "medium rare" burger arrived barely pink.

In Atlanta, all the pushers had been queued up in the jetbridge holding tablets displaying the names of the people they were picking up. In New York, they weren't. They were there in the jetbridge, but they looked baffled and had to check their paperwork when asked whether they were waiting for David Thistle.

At JFK, I used every moving sidewalk we came to (most of which were working), and the pusher (who stayed on the floor) still beat me to our gate.

But aside from that, we were pretty underwhelmed by JFK in general. It's very large, and the gates are widely spaced. The 53 gates in Terminal 4, where we were, were serving both domestic and international flights and were so busy that, arriving from ATL, we had to wait 20 minutes on the tarmac for our gate to be available. But the whole place seemed much less cosmopolitan than ATL—we didn't hear many languages spoken, or example, and all announcements were in English only. And the food options were crummy, running heavily to bad pizza, blah burgers, and prepackaged sandwiches. We pushed David's walking limits to go to the airport branch of the famous Palm, where we paid way too much for bland pappardelle Bolognese, a slightly overcooked steak, and a plate of asparagus. The head of roasted garlic garnishing the steak plate looked good until I tried to cut into it—it was petrified, dry all the way through, probably baked 8 or 10 times. In fairness, though, the Palm's brandy-peppercorn sauce was excellent!