traveling...

Yesterday I flew to North Carolina to spend, ummm, Christmas with my family. We're not christians, but we celebrate anyway. Or maybe some of my family are, but mostly not. Anyway, I was to fly thru Dallas Fort Worth, and due to airline weirdness, I ended up flying out an hour earlier than expected...

Which was great, because, although Austin's airport is pretty cool and has only local food (no chains... You cannot get MacDonald's at the Austin airport!) the DFW airport has - a wine bar! It's in Terminal A (ok, there's one in D, too, I think) and I was hoping that I'd be able to find it.

Sure enough I landed at gate A 19, La Bodega Wine Bar is at A 15, and I was leaving for RDU from gate A 14. I could drink and not have to worry about missing my plane. I figured that fate was telling me to sit down and have a drink, and you just shouldn't argue with fate...

So I sat down and ordered a glass of La Bodega's Cabernet Sauvignon. This wine bar makes it's own wine... Or rather there's a winery and if you want to sample their wine, you have to go to this wine bar. And they make a damn fine Cab, IMHO. It's a very tiny bar, maybe seats 8, 9 people. There's a little side area where they sell wine/liquor tchotchkes but, all in all, it's highly intimate. Plus you're in a bar in an airport, and what's the likelihood you're going to see any of the people at the bar again? So people tend to start talking - ok, people tend to start talking when I'm around anyway - and tell things about themselves that they probably just wouldn't share with the average person they'd known for five minutes...

Yesterday I shared the bar with an Air Force colonel getting ready to deploy to Iraq in January and an unmarried couple just back from a seven-day vacation. There were other people, too, further down, but they were talking amongst themselves. And then there was the bartender, Harrison.

Somehow within five minutes we were talking about marriages. The colonel had a failed, seventeen year marriage behind him and was trying to get engaged to someone that very day, but she wasn't returning his calls because he'd done something wrong. I owned up to having two exes. The couple weren't married. Harrison has three ex-wives. Like I said, I'm not even through my first glass of wine and I know a lot of stuff about these people!

The lady of the couple handed the colonel The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work, and he told her about The Five Love Languages. The latter is pretty religious, I find, from looking at the website, but the little quiz is kinda neat. I found it interesting that both the books had numbers in their titles. I'm sure there's some theory about self-help books needing finite numbers of things to do to fix your life. SMALL finite numbers. Like you wouldn't really want to read The Four Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy Three things to Make Your Marriage Really Rock.

And the colonel, bless his heart, didn't take the book. No, after the couple left, he handed it to me.

I'm hoping that's not some kind of a sign...