As a planner, I book early, especially when I’m flying five people from three states to a fourth. My hope was for us to meet at the airport and share the rental car to our common hotel, and do the same in reverse on the way home, and I was able to accomplish this, at least initially.

This turned out to be a great example of the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.

As travel conditions change, so do airline schedules, and our arrival and departure times eventually diverged. Then one person in our party changed his mind about his travel dates, both arrival and departure. In the last two weeks, three of us were moved onto a 737-MAX, which I was compelled to redress, and that affected our travel times again, although at least we got to fly on a Dreamliner.

After the dust settled, we had to add an Uber trip incoming. We shared the rental car to the airport outgoing but three of us ended up with a four-hour wait, plenty of time to get our checked luggage preponed and (briefly) lost. Upside? Also enough time to forage for something approaching real food.

We don’t live in the airport, so we can afford the extraordinary food prices for a day. The tricky bit is for me is to find something approaching clean food. After a week of travel, I was really ready for some unprocessed, organic, fresh food. Was there any to be had?

I searched three food courts and found one purveyor with a salad bar. I was able to pay extra for organic spinach with three non-organic toppings of choice: beets, chick peas, and feta cheese. For dressing the server sprinkled some EVOO and some vinegar–from separate cruets, not emulsified–and back at the gate I added some organic walnuts I had brought. Not bad! I thought it tasted very good, and although taste is only tangentially related to quality, I felt my body was pleased by the relative lack of biocides and inflammatory or rancid oils.

It’s all part of the new normal. We met some of our travel scheduling goals, and I found some airport food that was not excessively harmful and may have contained some actual nutrients. For the 21st century, this felt like a win!