My wife is traveling as I write this, headed to meet with family and celebrate a life that we lost a few months back; as it was the final wave of the last COVID-19 variant, memorial services were curtailed until such time as it was safer for everyone to gather. Given how amazingly eye-popping airfare was this summer, I’m home dog sitting Rocket; not my first choice, for I’d prefer to be there in support of both her and our missed relation, but like everyone else right now, we’re paying close attention to our finances and trying to make the best choices we can.
That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about being on the road, though; if you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’ll be headed to my annual Star Trek convention in August, or later this fall, will hopefully get back to see my family on the East coast. In fact, the Star Trek convention last summer (2021) was the first trip I’d taken since being in Atlanta for work in February, 2020; my second trip landed me right back in Las Vegas for an application development conference just after Thanksgiving. It was a tiny window between COVID variants that almost made life seem normal — however brief — which allowed me to indulge in a tiny tradition my wife and I had long observed.
Getting in and out of Tucson by air generally means flying to another hub; unlike our bigger sibling, Phoenix, there are only a handful of nonstop destinations we can get to. Traveling anywhere else requires heading through a hub city like Denver or Las Vegas, and given our druthers, we tend to opt for routings though Sin City since it’s slightly closer than Denver (and doesn’t feel like we’re going backwards quite as much as Los Angeles does). On one of our first trips through McCarran, we had time to kill and wandered through the various terminals and played tourist; as with most major airports, there were plenty of shops to peruse, including a purveyor of chocolate named Ethel M.
Having grown up on the East Coast, both my wife and I were aware of such luminaries as Fannie Farmer and Russell Stover; to our delight, we found Ethel M. was of a kind, if not of a higher order altogether. (Much later, on a vacation to Las Vegas to take in the Love show, we took a tour of the Nevada chocolate factory and discovered that Ethel M. was founded by one of the original “M’s” in M&M Mars.) That first trip, we walked out of that shop with more chocolate than we’d intended… and very little of it made it home, either.
So now, with every subsequent trip through Las Vegas, we go out of our way to swing through Ethel M. and pick up the latest Willy Wonka-esque confection they’ve dreamed up. Yes, it’s that good.