Airplane food is never going to raise any bars for stunning cuisine. Not to say that it can't be good... I've had some amazing meals in-flight... but that most of the time it's just there and something to eat when you're hungry, not something to be enjoyed.

My first meal yesterday was a nice rice dish with some kind of pea mash that I thought sounded great, so far as vegetarian options go. But the peas were inundated with so much mint that it was like chewing a stick of gum with all the wrong textures, so I didn't end up eating it. Instead I ate a small roll that was on the tray.

The second meal I got was a bag with a tiny sandwich and an apple in it. By this point I was pretty hungry, but the roll on my sandwich was sopping wet and disgusting, so all I got was a small apple.

After 8-1/2 hours with nothing but a piece of bread and a dwarf fruit in my stomach, I was hungry enough to eat just about anything. So when my third (and final) meal of a roasted vegetable sandwich was put in front of me, I tore into it. The bread was actually nice and crusty... but the vegetable mix in the middle tasted metallic and kind of funky. That should have been a red flag, but I ate it anyway because I was famished.

Then proceeded to be sick to my stomach almost immediately.

So instead of driving straight home over the mountains yesterday, I instead crashed at my sister's place so I could recover and drive directly to work this morning.

Where, despite having two (nearly) back-to-back vacations, it felt as if I never left.

If not for the photographs I took, it hardly seems as though I were gone at all.

Which means now I need a vacation.