Wichita Falls hosted us last night. Now, Wichita Falls does not have a Ritz Carlton. There’s no Four Seasons (tragically). You can’t even find an Omni in town. So look at these images:
Where did we stay?
Who built this fabulous lobby?
Check the fluffy bedding:
This is a Holiday Inn Express. Wow. And believe it or not, the hotel was $59–the best value of the Great American Road Trip thus far.
When we got into the car this morning, I noticed that the right rear tire was low on air. We stopped at a service station and pumped it up from 20 pounds to 28 pounds, then hit the road.
Cruising through Texas, I came upon what has to be the largest collection of hubcaps I’ve ever seen. They stretched for nearly an acre. I stopped to admire and the elderly owner came out on his Little Rascal. Unfortunately, he bashed his scooter up against the Cadillac, which sorta took the sheen off his hubcap collection. Luckily, he hit my Motorpool sticker, so no harm done.
From Witchita we passed through Dallas, visiting with friends, and then on to Longview, Texas. Horribly behind schedule, we pulled off in Longview to eat dinner at a Southern institution: the Waffle House.
Waffle Houses are far better when you’ve been drinking a prodigious amount of liquor. Really. It’s easier that way to overlook the greasy food, sleazy clientele, and grit of the place. Unfortunately, Kim and I weren’t drunk.
Just tired and hungry.
Kim, a Waffle House veteran, ordered her hash browns smothered, covered, diced, and peppered (that’s with onions, peppers, cheese, and tomatoes in Waffle House lingo). I ordered two poached eggs, bacon, biscuits, and grits. We both asked for hot coffee. Our coffee arrived fairly quickly and we sipped it in a silent stupor.
After about 10 minutes, I began to look around the Waffle House. At 11 p.m., there were four other people in the place in addition to me and Kim. The waitress, our short-order cook, and two other patrons. I’d noticed the other customers when we’d come inside. They were driving a 1983 Chevrolet Caprice Classic in an electric green color with 22-inch wheels. It sported an interesting appendage below the license plate–a pair of stainless-steel testicles. The driver of the Chevy Ca Hones, weighing in at 90 pounds, wore a matching, green, wife-beater t-shirt. His heavyweight his girlfriend, squashed into some alarmingly transparent white cotton britches, was having words with our short order cook.
The cook was working at the grill and furiously cooking eggs, bacon, sausage, and other assorted breakfast goods. Piles of food were boxed and ready to go out the door.
“Where are my scrambled eggs?” white hot pants asked the cook.
“Right here, m’am,” the cook answered. He pointed to an omelet.
“No, that’s an omelet,” hot pants said, “I want scrambled eggs.”
“What about my sausage?” hot pants asked.
“Coming right up, m’am,” the cook said casually.
At this point, Kim asked our waitress about our dinner. The waitress looked at us for a beat and said, “It will be right out.”
I could tell she was lying through her teeth. Another 20 minutes rolled by. Hot pants was still at the counter. Wife-beater came in to join her and the two of them were giving the short order cook the Longview Inquisition.
“Toast! I asked for TOAST, not raisin bread!” wife-beater said to the cook.
“I wanted sausage, not bacon,” hot pants announced to the Waffle House at large.
This caught Kim’s attention. She turned around, noticed the giant pile of to go boxes, smiled and asked hot pants, “Are y’all ordering for Patton’s Fifth Army?”
Hot pants was not amused. “No, we’ve just ordered for the two of us. They just can’t get it right.” She went back to glaring at the cook. Kim was about to ask a follow-up question before my loafer caught her shin under the table. Just then, our waitress reappeared.
“Rough night?” Kim asked her.
“Oh yes. I don’t know what’s going on. He’s been like this since I got here,” she said, motioning to the cook. He was flipping tomatoes theatrically and smiling broadly at Kim.
Pulling into Longview, Kim had recounted her years of eating every Saturday at a Waffle House in Birmingham. She and her friend Cassie had befriended all the wait staff, many of whom had worked for the same Waffle House for more than 20 years.
“How long have you worked here?” Kim asked the girl.
“Two weeks,” she replied, “We have all new management.”
Oh Lord, I thought. We’re goners. Just then, the cook launched a tomato through the air, sending it straight onto the floor. He looked at me and shrugged.
We decided not to plague the poor waitress with any more trouble and waited another 20 minutes in silence for dinner. Finally, our meals arrived. Kim’s hash browns and grilled cheese sandwich were fairly okay. My poached eggs were scrambled.
“Are these poached?” the waitress asked. I replied that poached eggs were boiled. She offered to have the chef take another stab at ‘em. I said I’d be happy with two fried eggs, sunny-side up.
“Great!” she replied perkily.
I began poking my grits and contemplating whether they could be used to patch my tires.
Then my fried eggs arrived, nearly raw. The short-order cook beamed at me from the grill. I beamed back and gave him a thumbs up. Kim, the waitress, and I burst into hysterics. Cook came over and told us he’d learned a lot in his year as a Waffle House employee. He motioned to a plate of food on an adjoining table and said, “That’s my breakfast!” It was covered in about a pint of Heinz 57 sauce.
“I mean, I knew how to cook before I got here.” he intoned seriously, “But this breakfast stuff can be tricky.”
It sure can. Kim paid for dinner and left the waitress a $10 tip (she’d had a tough night) and we motored on through the darkness.
A few hours later, at 2 am, we arrived in Shreveport. We were trying to make New Orleans by daybreak. But what was to be an 8-hour drive turned into an all-night fiasco. We finally decided to drive through the night, rather than to try to find a hotel at this hour. Kim is a cool cousin–up for anything.
At four o’clock, the moon over the swamp took on such a ghostly hue that I had to stop to snap this picture of the Brougham.
Finally, at 4:30, I was too tired to continue. I pulled into an Exxon station to put more air in the right rear tire, which was still leaking air slowly. Unfortunately, a large 18-wheeler blocked the air pump. So we parked and nodded off for an hour’s sleep.