Welcome Home Dinner: Pho Nga

flight How much does a girl have to take off to get home around here?

I didn’t think anything of it when I first booked the flight from Indianapolis to Los Angeles — I would board the plane at 8:30 a.m. and arrive at 1:30 p.m. A five-hour flight — no big deal, right? Well, what I failed to realize was that I would arrive to LAX at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, which was really 4:30 p.m. my time (since my body was still operating under Eastern Standard Time). So today, I spent a total of eight lovely hours in a little plane that stopped in Kansas City, Dallas and El Paso, before touching down in Los Angeles. I had to endure four take offs, four landings, four emergency announcements, and four flight attendants telling me to turn off my iPod (it wasn’t even on!). Since I didn’t have any time to run out to get food in between and Southwest Airlines only serves peanuts and little snacks to passengers, I went for eight hours hungry … and tired. But the good thing is that the airline began serving 100 Calorie Snacks and low-fat ginger cookies for snacks, instead of just greasy peanuts, which helped me tie my hunger over until landing.

After P picked me up from the Van Nuys Flyaway (thank you so much!), we went to eat pho. It was such a wonderful treat because I didn’t have a chance to eat any Asian food in Denver and Indianapolis and I was craving some great noodle pretty badly. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Canyon Country called Pho Nga that serves, no joke, one of the best pho’s around. You may not expect to find an authentic Vietnamese join in a little Canyon Country suburbia but the food served here can no doubt rival any place in the San Gabriel Valley! God bless P – since she’s a regular, a chef brought out a complimentary order of egg rolls! After I had a satisfying bowl of pho with rare beef and a refreshing spring roll with shrimps, rice noodle and basil serviced with sweet peanut-butter sauce, I knew I was finally home.

pho