It sure is hard to review a San Francisco-based coffee joint when you're not in San Francisco.

Although we did find one fantastic coffee house in D.C. (that we would encourage anyone visiting our nation's capital to visit), being elsewhere just underscores that our fair city has among the best, if not the very best, caffeine options around.

Too bad it doesn't translate to our airports.

Spending outragous amounts of money on coffee is not new to us. Spending $7 on a banana and two cups of 7-11-grade crap that purports to be "Peet's" is an insult, though. Perhaps the beans came from Peet's. But as we've discussed before, decent beans (and Peet's is above-average as corporate brands go) alone do not a good cup make. There's water. There's preparation. There's the proper equipment. All of which seem to be missing at the Oakland Airport "cafe" that we visited.

When the fancy blue van is picking you up at 4:30 a.m., making your own coffee isn't really an option for most of us. Thus we're stuck with airport coffee. Captive audience. Not much choice. Last thing any caffeine addict needs is a lack-of-coffee migraine at 30,000 feet.

Photo taken from from Scifilm, from the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," with William Shatner. Aside: Scifilm is a great resource for you fantasy/sci-fi film fans out there)