Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [3]
The next morning Bill leaped into the research, first on the Internet and then on the phone with AAdvantage and SkyMiles representatives. American and Delta both offered around-the-world rewards in conjunction with foreign airline partners, but at the time at least the American program appeared broader in scope, less limited in restrictions, and clearer on the parameters. So he began playing on the ONEworld Web site, constructing fantasy itineraries to test the feasibility of stringing together a bunch of wonderful destinations. By the end of the week he told Cheryl, “A brilliant idea. This baby is gonna fly.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Cheryl said, “about the timing. Would it be possible to save up enough miles and arrange our future work schedule so we could make the trip in late 2005 to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary?”
Bill smiled and patted himself on the back. “I sure was smart to marry such a genius.”
Neither of us could be certain at that point whether the timing would pan out, but we immediately settled on it as our target. From early in our marriage we’ve commemorated major milestones in our lives with special vacations, focused increasingly over the years on great eating opportunities. The idea goes back to our wedding, when we wrestled with a choice between diamond rings for Cheryl or a honeymoon in Kauai, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. The bank account wouldn’t cover both, and Cheryl ultimately decided on the Pacific escape, selecting for her finger a more unusual and less expensive band featuring her favorite stone, blue topaz. It turned out to be a fantastic decision for us, a memory to share forever and an experience to repeat in different ways over and over.
Our tenth anniversary took us only as far as Las Vegas, but we met up there with three long-term friends who paid more to travel to our wedding than we did for the event itself. The five of us paraded up and down the Strip on a neon-lighted New Year’s Eve and grazed our way through the most compelling menus in town at the time, early in the reign of the all-star absentee chef in Vegas, when Mark Miller and Wolfgang Puck shared the throne and Emeril Lagasse, still learning to talk good on TV, was merely a parvenu prince opening his first restaurant in town. Emeril’s suffered from start-up jitters on our visit (in such obvious ways that the maître d’ comped the dinner), but the kitchen teams at Miller’s and Puck’s places put together fine spreads.
When Cheryl’s fiftieth birthday approached, she planned a party at La Combe en Périgord, a lovely manor in southwestern France that serves as the base for annual weeklong culinary adventures we lead in the Dordogne. Arriving early, we picked up a rental car in Barcelona and carefully collected a couple of cases of wine for the occasion from small, independent vintners along the French Mediterranean between Collioure in the south and Bandol on the lip of the Riviera. Many of the bottles came from Jean-Benoît Cavalier at Château de Lascaux in Vacquières, who greeted us fresh from his fields in a faded polo shirt and half-zipped work pants, and proudly shared tastes of all of his handcrafted creations while meticulously explaining the differences in the soils where he grew each of the grape varietals. At La Combe, Cheryl’s mother and a number of good friends joined us for a two-day feast covering more courses than you need for a Ph.D. in gastronomy.
For Bill’s sixtieth birthday, he staged an elaborate dine-around at our favorite restaurants and joints in pre-Katrina New Orleans, beginning with warm-up meals at