The GPS my parents got me last Christmas (thanks to Judy, Paul and Jesus), for use on this very road trip, gives the user the option between finding the shortest route with respect to time, and the shortest route with respect to distance. Since this car is leased and we have a finite amount of miles to use before handing it in, we are using the latter option. Because of this, the GPS plots routes that take us through all kinds of strange places and roads that I can pretty much guarantee that you will never, ever, for any reason, drive on. It’s kind of fun.
Yesterday, around lunch time, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch along one of these strange routes through nowhere in particular:
Two things about the sign:
1. Pretty bold claim about the Home Cookin’ on it.
2. I still don’t know what Ham Loaf is. I wish I ordered it to find out, but Amanda and I decided to order something else that we had never seen on a menu before: Chicken Pretzels.
When we saw this, our imaginations immediately, and obviously, roused up images of a chicken finger wrapped in a pretzel, or a pretzel stuffed chicken finger. Or something that combines a pretzel and chicken. Maybe a deep fried chicken tender with pretzel batter? We were intrigued enough to order it, like I said. Here’s what we got:
Chicken tenders shaped like pretzels. Duh. Of course that’s what Chicken Pretzels would be. We are dumb.
In any event, we ate the crap out of them, along with a turkey club sandwich (boring) a salad of mostly spinach (gross) and corn fritters covered in powdered sugar (gross for me, good for Amanda):
The meal was passable if not a little bad (cold fries) and again, Amanda liked the fritters. She has bad taste in food, as they were basically fried creamed corn, which is just implausibly disgusting. I used to think that you could fry anything and cover it in powdered sugar and it would turn out delicious, but I was proven wrong. Thanks The New Fort Restaurant. Deep fried creamed corn is foul. It’s a fact.
After lunch, Amanda wanted to try some diner pie. This place had it.
It was also passable, but not great as lemon meringue pie (as another flavor of pie, it was disgusting). Please note, however, the enormous coffee mug that housed Amanda’s coffee . Here it is up against her face:
*Inside Joke Alert* – Get me some goddamned coffee!
After lunch, we had a long and winding trip through some back roads on our way to Pittsburgh, where Amanda’s friend Lauren lives. We had some time to kill during the trip, as Lauren wouldn’t be back in Pittsburgh until 8ish, so we made a few stops at things we found mildly to very interesting.
The first stop was at one of those fun (not much fun) scenic view pull offs. Here’s the view from Mount Ararat in the Allegheny Mountains: Elevation 2464 feet.
Ho hum. of interest at this stop, however, was the guard rail that hopefully keeps out of control cars from flying off if the cliff. The thing was covered in weird sayings and other tags:
The saying pictured said something like, “Here’s to never growing old, to plans without reason and blah blah blah.” Some nonsense.
After the quick stretch at the side of the road, the next interesting sight was a crazy cemetery. It was huge and full of decaying corpses being gross underground:
It was actually quite a nice place.
The next thing that caught our eyes was a weird beach thing. It was a big pit that they apparently fill with water during the summer. It was about the size of a football field and in the middle of nowhere. It made for an uninteresting picture, as it is currently full of leaves and garbage. Of interest however, is this:
I am sorry that you have to look at my exposed nipple and not Amanda’s instead.
An hour or so later, we were finally in Pittsburgh. We were about an hour and a half early, so we parked the car at Lauren’s apartment building and set out to walk around the area. Lauren lives right next to a few universities (Carnegie Mellon and The University of Pittsburgh), so we didn’t really see downtown at all, but the sights around were good enough. For instance, a block from her apartment building:
It is exactly what it looks like: A puppeteer dinosaur in a sport coat and sneakers outside of a completely unmarked office building. This is one of the best ways to eat children I think. were I a dinosaur with a taste for kids, I might steal this strategy for sure.
I know that some cities are fairly lenient with their homeless population and in some cases, a little more loose with the drug stuff that goes on, but Pittsburgh takes the crown:
I have no joke.
After walking around for an hour or so, we sat around for little longer waiting for Lauren. She finally arrived and we headed out for dinner (finally):
We talked and ate, like normal folks do, and I snuck a few peeks at the television playing the Jets/Dolphins game, as normal fellows do. I also ate some pretty good chili:
Very sharp cheese on top and perfectly salted tortilla chips to complement the slight heat of the chili itself. Not bad at all. The two women with me order boring salads because they are women.
Now, at this point in the trip, you may want to ask me, “Ryan, who on earth is taking these pictures of you and your wife/friends when you are at restaurants? If everyone involved is featured in the picture, who is snapping the photograph? Do you have a floating camera or something? A drone? Maybe you’re paying someone to follow you around and take these things?”
Nope. You’re way off, and probably a little slow. Last night, our waiter/waitress took this picture. Our waiter/waitress also, as far as we could surmise, takes estrogen on a regular basis. He/she looked like a girl, on the beefier side of being a female, but not humongous and had a strange voice, but not too strange. He/she also, as I caught a little later in the dining experience, the remnants of an underbeard. Awesome.
According to Lauren, the restaurant is in a pretty peculiar part of town. I use peculiar because it is a synonym of the word ‘queer’. It is not Ok in today’s society to call someone “queer”, but from what I can tell, “peculiar” hasn’t reached that level of societal venom yet. You may use i in your everyday lexicon. You have my permission.
We got up this morning, cancelled all walking around plans because it is raining, had an OK bagel and are now driving through Ohio. Until next time…
No comments:
Post a Comment