The travel season begins

Here's a conundrum. Eating is one of the most-anticipated joys of travel for me (yes, I suppose you might say I look forward to it with relish.) So why is it that the best vacations begin with long journeys that afford the most unsatisfying eating?

On long flights, I worry that there won't be enough to eat, so I stash some snacks in the carryon bag. We worry that the first meal won't happen soon enough, so we eat something unsatisfying yet fattening in the airport (we'd arrived with an hour to spare, of course.) On each leg of travel, we both eat everything the airline provides: the spongy roll, the banquet meal, overcooked and underheated, the dessert that we'd pass up if it were available under any other circumstance. We're stuffed, yet unfulfilled.

An hour later, we're bored and a little peckish. We eat some of the stashed chocolate. Later, we eat more of it. Now we're guilt-ridden, and not in the good brimming-with-cheesecake way. The time changes as we arrive in Europe. The airline feeds me breakfast at my body's midnight. We eat a second, equally unhealthy and empty-calorie-laden breakfast on the connecting flight to our destination. Had there been an airport layover, we'd no doubt have stopped for coffee and who knows what else, for a total of three breakfasts. So two breakfasts isn't even a record. We arrive in Gothenburg, Sweden just in time for lunch.

From now until October, I'll be reporting on food and travel experiences from Sweden, to Norway, to the United Kingdom. It'll be up from here.