Earlier this year I wrote an article entitled “Counting the Cost of Discount Travel, My Spirit Airlines Ordeal.” www.tylertxdirectory.com/49266/counting-the-cost-of-discount-travel-my-spirit-airlines-ordeal/ The article documents the horrendous experience I had with the cut- rate airline while traveling with my family to Oregon for vacation. Of course my wife spent a considerable amount of time expressing our thoughts to Spirit’s “customer service” department.

Now generally, I have no compunction about traveling with a low rate carrier. My wife and I are certainly not anywhere near affluent, but we do manage to travel a fair amount, and we do so because we are willing to travel light, sometimes aboard cheap airlines, and occasionally sleep on the airport floor. We’ve flown the likes of Ryan Air (which is the European equivalent of Spirit), and we content ourselves with the drinks and snacks we can bring aboard. Ryan is definitely low budget, but it’s at least professional. My last experience with Spirit was anything but. They are as economical as Ryan but not as efficient.

Following our last excursion to Oregon my wife managed to badger the company into giving us a travel voucher. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted, since we really had no desire to fly Spirit again. And it wasn’t a lot, but we couldn’t raise too much more of a fuss given what we had paid for the tickets in the first place. But now after six months we’re looking for someplace to go to escape the ravages of family discord and spend the Thanksgiving Holiday with more pacifistic influences. So it seems we’re back to those vouchers… Is it worth the frustration of traveling an airline you don’t really trust if the price is right? And how “right” must the price be? Flying Spirit is not unlike flying standby, you may or may not leave when you anticipated, so you keep your schedule flexible. But does the fact that you have the time to plan that way, make the cost of frustration go down?

These are all thoughts I am forced to take into consideration as I look at the possibility of Fall travel. Given the fact that it’s a busy travel season, it remains to be seen whether or not we’ll even find rates cheap enough to justify pulling the trigger on those vouchers. If we ultimately do, here’s to hoping the subsequent story is contains fewer plot points than the last account.

I should probably have come clean about this earlier, but I while my son was attending a birthday party at “ijump,” in Tyler this past weekend, my wife and I blew our self- imposed dietary restrictions in a big way. Under the guise of running errands (and we did actually run some) we visited what has become summer staple in this town. Andy’s frozen Custard. It’s kind of a point of interest to me that the local ice creamery has so far surpassed other similar businesses like Dairy Queen and Braums.

The Andy’s concrete (roughly compatible with the blizzard, but infinitely better) includes seasonal classics like the Key Lime Pie, which is what brought my wife and I out last week. Short of experiencing actual Italian gelato, in Italy, the Key Lime Pie concrete is about the best frozen dessert there is. On a hot day in late summer it’s an amazing experience. Readers are encouraged to avail themselves of the novelty before it vanishes for another year.

I hate our nation’s past- time, and I’m not talking about baseball. I dearly wish I could still genuinely refer to one of my favorite sports by that vaunted moniker. No the past- time I hold in such contempt is protesting. I’ve said it before but unfortunately since my parent’s generation we’ve raised our young people to believe that the only true meaning to be found in life is found in demonstrating one’s opposition to absolutely anything in the most obnoxious and disrespectful manner, humanly possible.

Given my feelings on this subject one can imagine something of my response to the rash of NFL player protests. It goes something like this: “Hey morons! I watch football so that I can escape socio-political commentary! I don’t want it in my past- times! I do not care about your message. I don’t want you to speak out on the playing field! You want to raise a ruckus? Write a book!”

All that being said, I did read a story about one truly “protest worthy” cause. It seems the Miami Marlins have a no facial hair policy! As a bearded man myself I find this policy prejudicial and outrageous! Really in this day and age?! When we’ve made so much progress as a society. Well one starting pitcher is standing up for his rights. But Andrew Cashner, isn’t carrying a sign, or attempting to annoy fans with disrespect. He isn’t coining slogans like bearded lives matter, he’s simply saying he’ll leave the team and sign with a more folically progressive ball club. This is a form of protest I can endorse.

The problem with protestors like the ones in the NFL is really two fold. First off, socio- politics has infected every area of their lives. They simply can’t turn it off. Furthermore, they’re looking for meaning in their lives and for whatever reason working hard, raising a family and generally trying to be a good human being isn’t doing as much for them as it does the rest of us.
The fact is, the NFL is already a very political organization. It has been for years. The problem is, I and others like me don’t want to watch a three- hour political commercial (sorry Costas). We want to escape the news not watch it made by overpaid adolescents looking for a cause. If that continues we may just look elsewhere for that escape.

Years ago when I first started writing for the Tyler TX Directory I posted a piece on the best and the worst buffets in Tyler. I took particular joy in lampooning the likes of Ci-Ci’s Pizza and Ryan’s “steak” house. The top of my best Buffets was only a part time buffet and definitely one of my favorite pizza joints in town. Unfortunately, after having a meal there about a week ago, that still wakes me up at night; I’ve been forced to rethink my position on Double Dave’s Pizzeria.

My understanding is that Double Dave’s in Tyler, is either under new management, or has been sold to new owners. I really hate to see good eateries with seemingly good business models change hands. The newcomers to the restaurant rarely maintain the same quality, or the atmosphere as those who possessed the original enthusiasm for the business. Incorporating new ways to pinch penny’s while enjoying the already established customer base, they milk the cash cow as long as possible until the public notices the slide and eventually the doors close and the new investors write off the loss.

I don’t know for sure if that’s what’s up at Double Dave’s but my last visit was so disappointing I won’t be returning anytime soon. About a week ago was my wife and my first anniversary. Do to some family issues we were unable to arrange a private lunch together so we elected to meet some of the family at “Dave’s.” It was a mistake. When we walked through the doors it seemed warm. Turned out, the air conditioner had broken… during the summer… in Tyler Texas. According to the testimony of the cashier, it had been out for days. The place was about half full and only a couple of the tables had been bussed. We had to clear and clean our own table, much to the embarrassment of the cashier who was also serving as bus boy.

The food was another issue. And it wasn’t that it was bad, but was so slow in coming. The restaurant’s signature item, the pepperoni rolls, only came out at the rate of about six at a time, every twenty minutes or so. And as good as the food was the heat in the building made it nearly unbearable. After cutting our dinner short my wife and I arranged other plans for the afternoon and evening but the disappointment with a bistro we had once enjoyed remains.

Over the last forty years or so, private and religious education has undergone a huge shift. In the nineteen seventies a bomb went off in the academic world. It was called Accelerated Christian Education or ACE. At the time it was seen as a very viable option, particularly for evangelical churches and families looking for a faith based option to the growing secularization taking place in American public schools. The new curriculum placed mainstream evangelical faith formation and self- guided (work at your own pace), studies as the guiding principle of the new methodology.

And while the easy out of the box portability of the program (and others like it) made it hugely popular in the seventies and eighties, the abandonment of traditional classroom learning in favor of rote memorization, came at the price of true academics. The teacher was relegated to the role of supervisor, with little or no role in mentoring his or her students. And the students spend their time learning to confine themselves to a cubical plodding through a work book, filling in blanks, with no real stimulus for critical thinking.

In more recent years however, we’ve seen a counter wave hit. It’s called classical education, (and I would include Principle Approach as part of it). The new thinking on religious education is not actually anything like new… which is kind of the point. Religious schools of all theological strips are coming the realization that character and academics must work together. It’s important that our students know how to reason critically. They need the benefits of the lessons one learns from Plato, St. Paul, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Foxe, William Shakespeare; in short they need an historical, classical and literary education. Memorization of facts, theorems, systems or even scripture is simply not enough by itself. Nor is individualized leaning. Students need the community and mentorship that a traditional religious classroom can provide.

Christian Heritage school in Tyler is providing all of these things to its students, and it has been for more than thirty years. The school was classical and traditional before those attributes had found their way back into the mainstream American Christian thinking. The school provides educator centered classrooms a good teacher to student ratio and emphasizes academic excellence as well as Christian character. Classical Principle Approach education is not simply a trendy form of education. It’s a time tested method that will never disappear entirely. For more information on Christian Heritage School in Tyler, visit the school’s website at www.chstyler.org .