Tag: road trip

We all know that most Canadians are polite. I now know why. They sublimate their fury. Canadians drive like enraged Mongols. They walk through public places like they were electrons pinging around in a supercollider. I can only confirm that’s true for the ones in Montreal, of course, and only for some of them, but evidence is evidence.

Our hotel in Montreal sits next to the largest mall in Quebec. I mean I could spit on it from my window if I wanted to, and if my window opened. I was surprised, since I had only been looking for a reasonable rate at a hotel that was still inside Quebec. We had gotten into town right in the middle of the Montreal evening rush hour that lasts from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. We were tired and snippy, and we just wanted to eat something cheap and fast, then go to bed.

At the mall I realized that only one in fifty or so Canadians is overweight. I now know why. Fast food at the largest mall in Quebec was not a double cheeseburger with super-size fries. It was a small bowl of tortellini that cost the same as a double cheeseburger with super-size fries. I wasn’t getting the same dollar to calorie ratio that I do at home, but I didn’t feel cheated. I felt kind of smug and superior. I drove around and cut people off in traffic for a while, and all the nastiness went away.

These Legos have nothing to do with anything except I saw them in the mall and thought they were cool. The Midgaard Serpent is just out of frame to the left.

When I walked into the restaurant last night my feet stuck to the floor. The smell of grease choked me up a little, and I couldn’t hear my wife over the pressure cookers and fans. I assumed the fans were there to keep the sole employee from exploding like a CO2 cartridge in a bonfire.

I decided that I had done something bad without knowing it, and my wife was bringing me to Uncle Nick’s Greek Fried Chicken to punish me.

One of the fun things about visiting other cities is eating at restaurants we’ve never heard of. McDonald’s, Chipotle, and Waffle Houses are everyplace, so why eat at one of them in when you’re in Nashville or Columbus? We don’t like those damn places much even when we’re at home.

In Nashville I picked out a place called the Whiskey Diner—lots of dead cow and single malt scotch. However, my wife leaned heavily towards the Frothy Monkey, a hip coffee house with comfort food. I was skeptical, since we’re not hip, we’re suspicious of comfort, and neither of us drinks coffee. But I agreed to go with her to the Frothy Monkey for one excellent reason: when it turned out to be horrible I could hold it over her for the rest of the trip and achieve the moral high ground, from which I would dictate all future food decisions.

Sadly, the Frothy Monkey served up some pretty fine food. The grilled salmon sandwich did not suck. So, I arrived in Columbus with no record of being correct when she had blown it. When she suggested Uncle Nick’s I said, “Uncle Nick’s Greek Fried Chicken? Sure, sweetie, it sounds great. I’ll pull up the directions on my iPad, without which previous generations must have circled the same four blocks in bewilderment, until they gave up and built a new home on whatever sidewalk they had run out of gas beside.”

Uncle Nick’s had four parking spaces. That was fine, since it had three tables, also sticky. The only thing Greek about the chicken was that it shared a menu with gyros and baklava. The menu also offered family packs ranging up to 200 pieces of chicken with 300 orders of potatoes, which could be the right size for some Greek families I guess.

We ordered chicken from the skeezy guy leaning against the register. Then we waited. We waited some more. A fellow wearing flip-flops came in and picked up bags and bags of food. He might have been the 200-piece chicken guy. My wife was very quiet. Or, maybe she was talking a streak and I couldn’t hear her over all the pressure cookers. At last, Skeezy Guy brought us chicken. This is what it looked like.

Without exaggeration, it was the best fried chicken I’ve eaten in 20 years, damn it. I may not get to make another food-related decision for the rest of the trip.

https://www.unclenicksgfc.com/

https://frothymonkey.com

I am objectively a lousy father. Compared to my father, I am a psychotic crack addict trying to raise orchids in a toilet.

It started with a rose-colored memory of my family’s driving vacations when I was a boy. Swinging through the western states and the national parks. Driving from Texas to the arctic circle and back. That sort of thing. My wife and I had long discussed a trip like that, and we finally decided to do it: Dallas to Montreal and back.

Many lists were made, and my wife declared them good. We packed the necessities, like phones, computers, and some other stuff, maybe underwear. We got the house-sitter, and the person to come in multiple unspecified times a day to check on the cats, and new shells for the shotgun. We packed the night before departure. My wife would no more wait to pack last minute than she would kick a puppy over the backyard fence.

This morning, the day of departure, we loaded the car and did a cat headcount. We came up one head short.

That didn’t worry us much. This cat is a big baby, and he probably hid someplace because we were acting weirder than usual. We checked his usual hiding places. We searched unusual hiding places. We looked behind things and under things, in every cabinet twice and every closet three times. We shook cans of treats and containers of food while calling his name like the kid in Shane. He did not appear.

My wife felt sure he was hiding in some super-secret kitty spot. I thought maybe he had run out when we were loading the car. He could be wandering the neighborhood, dazed with hunger, staggering onto Crazy-Street, the six-lane race track behind our house, to be crushed like a cat-shaped jar of jelly. My fears were valid—we once had a cat that sneaked out the front door and never came back.

We searched the neighborhood. No cat. At last my wife reasoned that the cat was too much of a coward to ever go outside, so we should get on the road. I agreed, but I felt bad about it—like a rotten kitty-dad. We notified the people staying in our house to watch out for the cat and tell us if they saw him.

I pulled the car out of the driveway, certain that our cat was, at that very moment, dodging cars someplace down the block. I drove the other way though, because Montreal is in that direction. After five minutes I couldn’t stand it. I turned the car around and drove home. Our cat was laying where he always lays, on our bed, with a, “Holy shit, what are you doing back?” expression.

As we drove our first leg to Little Rock, I felt relieved and thrilled that our cat was safe at home, thinking bad thoughts about it. But all the way there a voice in my head said, “YOU WERE WILLING TO LEAVE YOUR CAT BEHIND TO GET SQUISHED BY A CAR, WEREN’T YOU? ASSHOLE.”

Little Rock is beautiful. Here’s a picture.

By the way, east of Dallas I found out there are no Buc-ees on the way to Little Rock, and I strongly recommended we go back home.