I have no problem with that in general. The cereal-eating was focused and vivid (it was Cap'n Crunch), and anyway it was over in a couple of pages. Nicholson Baker's entire novel The Mezzanine is like that, and it's just fine.
But so much of my time was spent reading about those people going from A to B to C on their way to D, and for what?
There was a similar episode in _Anathem_, which I generally liked. But for some reason the characters had to go from A to B and the best way to get there was to go over the North Pole, and the book stopped for fifty pages until they got over the Pole and everything could continue.
In a different world some editor would have persuaded Stephenson to cut the whole thing out, and I used to hope he would one day meet that editor and we would live in that world, but by now I've given up.
I remember there's an episode in The Princess Bride where Goldman interrupts Morgenstern and says “At this point there's a long section about [I forget what] that I cut out because it isn't important to the plot, except that along the way Fezzik obtains a Holocaust Cloak, and I'm only mentioning it because I don't want you to wonder where the Holocaust Cloak came from.”
I would have liked to have seen something like that in Anathem: two sentences along the lines of “Then we had to get to Siberia by driving an APC over the North Pole, but the less said about that the better” and then the book moves on.
Since the Alaska trip to find POTUS in Snow Crash, it's rare to see a Stephenson novel without some variant of The Nordic Voyage. Hackworth traveling to meet the drummers, Waterhouse inheritance dealings in the cold northern Midwest, Root in Boston, maker-kids driving up into the hills to their falcon9 knockoff. The Anthem north pole crossing fits right in, almost to the point of parody.
Interesting pattern - Reamde also provides an example. Of course, in Cryptonomicon there is also a literal Nordic Voyage, from the coast of Norway to the Swedish coast, but he skips over it entirely, only giving the highlights retrospectively from the perspective of his least reliable narrator.
The pole expedition is one of the parts of Anathem I consistently skip, sometimes opting to read the part where The Protagonist deals with The Obstacle.
