Food! Glorious food!

Q and T are asleep in one of the queen-sized beds, Janneke sits and reads the New York Times in the other, and I sit and do this, on the free wireless connection in our hotel room in Waynesboro, VA. We are halfway to Alabama, and we are going to take a breather here for a day before diving back into the car.

A place where our two tykes do remarkably well. Nary a squabble today in 9 car-hours (10 clock-hours) of driving. It helps, of course, to have video games, magic electronic talky-books, DVD players, snacks, and limitless patience on the part of at least one parent. Well, OK, we have everything but that last one. But patience was hardly needed - they were just super. And only at the very end did we do any sort of wrong-turn-type brain freeze - Pulling off the highway, Mapquest directions fluttering to the floor, their purpose served, literally looking at the front of our hotel, eagerly awaiting the turn into the parking lot, we held out our arms in anguish as the intersection we had turned into became not the portico of a Best Western, but rather the return ramp onto Highway 64, this time heading north. Three miles and a recovered directions sheet later, we pulled to the same intersection, drove carefully through it, and THEN turned left onto DeWitt Boulevard, followed quickly by Apple Tree Lane. Disembarked, checked in, changed clothes, and hit the pool (Q, T, me) and the fitness center (Janneke) for our pre-supper wind-down.

We walked to the Cracker Barrel restaurant next to the hotel (frustrated by the lack of a sidewalk linking the two) on my insistence. We've never eaten there! It'll be a new experience - not like going to the KFC four hundred yards further up the strip! Look at the parking lot - it's full! The menu looks great! Let's try it!

Turns out, though, there is a very large machine at the back of every Cracker Barrel restaurant that sucks all the flavor out of the food before they serve it. Another gizmo injects fat, sugar, and salt into the damp, squishy husks of what used to be perfectly good ingredients, and then they truck it out to be devoured at the troughs by hordes of fleshy, gap-toothed, God-fearin', kid-smackin', sleeveless-T-shirt-wearin', Wranglers-seam-bustin' Southerners. Who are very polite.

(The flavor they suck out of the food, by the way, is loaded into tanker trucks and shipped to a factory in Georgia, where it's refined and put into tubes and distributed nationwide as fireworks.)

Tomorrow, we'll hit the Shenandoah National (and not State, Janneke, for the umpteenth time) Park for a day of hiking in the mostly-sunny, high-of-82-degree glory that will be July the 6th. We'll top off the day with another visit to the pool and a shame-faced slink straight past the Cracker Barrel and off to another bright star in Waynesboro's culinary constellation.

Applebee's.