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standard price of an airport bloody mary
Saturday, July 4 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Today we would be beginning a trip to Europe, so there were a few things little things we needed to do before we left.
Most things were done, but there are always details related to cleanliness (for the benefit of our housekeeper) which
often get left to the last minute. So, for example, today I did things like clean the microwave oven and do a superficial
scrub to the shelves of the refrigerator, which gradually accumulate puddles of various fluids that then slowly dehydrate
as they accumulate particulate debris.
Our house sitter for this trip would be Colleen, the baker in New Paltz who, along with her partner Ryan]
might eventually be living with us for
a prolonged duration so as to be able to rent out her place in Poughkeepsie to make things more affordable.
She arrived a little after noon and we gave her some last minute details, mostly about dealing with our dogs and keeping
them from raising the ire of the neighbors.
We left for the JFK airport shortly afterwards, with me driving and Gretchen doing lots of stuff related to march
organizing on her phone. On the Palisades Parkway at the southbound gas station just north of the George Washington Bridge, she took over driving duties. Throughout the drive, Gretchen had been growing increasingly curious about Ella Langley, a breakout country music star with several songs (most of them great) playing on the country music stations we listen to. Gretchen played some songs from Langley's first album Hungover and then from her second album, Dandelion. The title song from that second album has yet to enter rotation on country music radio stations, but Gretchen was so smitten by it that she played it three times in a row. It opens with the sound of katydids, evidently on a sweltering Alabama night, as they chattering much faster than they ever do where we live in the Catskill foothills. (There are no katydids in the Adirondacks.)
July 4th is not a big driving day, so we had good driving conditions for nearly the entire drive. It was only in the last four miles or so that things slowed down, but that's you can't expect anything better when driving to JFK. There is something about the way people drive and the sheer ugliness of eastern Queens (starting right around that mosque whose main dome appears to be a repurposed water tower) that makes one anxious and aggravated. Even so, we got to the parking place without too many near-collisions or obnoxious drivers making a sport of not letting us merge. I'd dressed in long trousers and a long-sleeve shirt in anticipation of the chill of an transAtlantic air flight, so it was good to spend the time waiting for the shuttle in the air conditioned comfort of the parking company office, which appeared to be run by a people of Indian extraction. For some reason they'd decorated the interior of their office with the kind of festive glass balls one normally sees on a Christmas tree, though they hung instead on extremely short strings attached to the dropped ceiling. Off somewhere behind the counter, it sounded like someone was watching a YouTube video with a lifeless narration produced by artificial intelligence.
Once our shuttle ride dropped us off at JFK's Terminal 4, we found our way to the long line entering security, there we were intercepted by a guy doing marketing for Clear, a business that sells access to a rapid security procedure that bypasses that long line. He asked if we wanted a free trial of its services and I said we did. So then we spent about then minutes at a Clear-branded registration kiosk entering our details and scanning our passports. This took longer than expected because for some reason we first had to delete an old aborted Clear registration in their database. (I think this resulted from when I'd tried to use a free Clear account to confirm my identity on LinkedIn.com in an attempt at a better shot at getting a job, but I hadn't been able to get it to work, perhaps because my given name and what people call me are not the same.) A Clear family plan would cost us aboout $300 per year and wouldn't be worth it given the frequency with which we actually travel, but it was good to use today, because it probably saved us about 20 minutes of the worst kind of waiting around.
Inside the airport, we both realized that we were hungry, and Gretchen was excited by the prospect of cauliflower wings when we passed a Buffalo Wild Wings. But it was a little far from our gate, so we tried some other café/restaurant called Van Wyck Bar & Grill, but when Gretchen asked a woman behind the counter about whether we could just order fries (as all the menu items with fries also included things a vegan would never eat), the woman seemed irritated to be having to talk to a customer, as if that was a job for the robots. She kept telling us to scan the QR code and use the app. We sat down and Gretchen got out her phone to do this, but when she saw that the price of a bloody mary was $24, she was incensed and we left that place. After hiking all the way to Buffalo Wild Wings ("B-dubs"), we saw that $24 was the standard price of bloody marys everywhere. But at least the guy there was willing to take our order the traditional way, so we got a large order of fries, a small order of cauliflower wings, Gretchen got a virgin bloody mary (only $7) and I got a 14oz Hazy Little Thing for $14. We ate these at the bar, where frenetic energy was decidedly off-putting. The guy we'd ordered from was handling a thousand details at once and seemed on the edge of losing his shit, and somehow our tiny order took at least a half hour to result in edible food. Meanwhile the FIFA World Cup was on the screens over the bar, but not much actual futbol was being played.
Gretchen had cleverly arranged picked our seating so that it was in the middle cluster between the two aisles on the big jumbo jet we'd be flying in. She had me on the starboard aisle and herself on the port ailse with two empty seats between us. The risk was that someone would opt to sit in those seats, but many similar such seats were empty and it seemed like a risk worth taking. The worst thing that could happen would be that some rando would end up in one of the seats, and then one of us would swap with them and then we'd still have a good chance of having a single empty seat between us. As it happened, those two seats remained empty, so we ended up sharing a space nearly equivalent to that of a full couch, long enough for one of us to lie down. Gretchen would take full advantage of this, though this meant when I tried to lie down I mostly had to do it sort of on top of her in a way that was better than trying to sleep in a single seat but nowhere near as comfortable as sleeping on a couch.
For entertainment, I started off watching a series of short videos describing the economic model for various companies like IKEA, Chick Fil-A, 7Eleven, and branded hotels. Then I made the mistake of trying to watch Inception, which I had tried to watch in the past but had to abandon. It was even worse trying to watch it on the plane with the sound of the big jet engines destroying the audio, and I soon had to abort. I ended up rewatching Apollo 13 instead as two glasses of red wine and ambien worked their magic. Before that kicked in, we got our special vegan meal, which wasn't bad: chana masala with rice and spinach. Evidently the menu planner had decided that vegans love chickpeas, because it also came with a cold salad of chickpeas with cherry tomatoes in a strongly vinegar sauce.
Not only did we have the luxury of two extra seats to spread out into, but there didn't seem to be any babies on the plane, which might be a first for a flight of this scale. There a couple of youngish children, but they were all extremely well-behaved. My only complaint was that one of them was given to sneezing occasionally.
Manhattan skyline viewed from the drive to the airport. Click to enlarge.
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