Here's my hotel breakfast story:
I loathe the "free" hotel breakfasts, the kind that mid-level chain hotels in the US provide. They're all the same, with some combination of bagels/English muffins/toast, a self-serve waffle machine that looks like it's been ecto-plasamed after exactly three waffles, and some kind of egg thing; either reconstituted scrambled "eggs" or some sort of "gourmet" egg sandwich thing of slightly lesser quality than you'd find at a gas station. Maybe a bowl of fresh fruit and some little boxes of cold cereal.
If the food weren't bad enough, the people are worse. Hang a "free breakfast included" sign out, and people revert back to cave days, I swear. No combed hair, no washed face, still in pajamas, and going at the food like it's Animal House.
So, hotel breakfasts like that don't sway me to stay, but MrsT, natural born tightwad that she is, can't resist, and most of our driving vacations follow some kind of breakfast negotiation:
"Where should we eat for breakfast?"
"There's a diner a few miles away, but the hotel, you know, has free bre-"
"I'm not eating the hotel breakfast."
"Well, not every day, but maybe a couple of-"
"Nope."
"Ok, maybe just the day we leave, just to save time getting on the roa-"
"Not. Gonna. Happen."
Of course, that meant we had breakfast at the hotel this morning, since we were leaving today.
Well,
one of us had breakfast.
I snagged a table and watched her purse as she went up first. 10 minutes later, she came back with juice, a bowl of cereal, and a boiled egg (god only knows when that thing was actually boiled).
I looked, and it was like Grand Central Station at rush hour. No order, even though there was a sign telling people to line up and enter one side, get food, then exit the other side. Ha!
After about 10 minutes of watching, I thought I might be able to shoot the gap and possibly grab some unnamed foil-wrapped sandwich the staff kept loading into a hot display case...waiting...waiting...and a woman elbowed between a few people, stuck her entire arm in the display case, and swept the full contents, probably a dozen sandwiches, into a bag she brought just for that. Premeditated...that made it even worse.
At that point, I decided the grapes I had with me were going to have to do, but I couldn't tear myself away from the whole spectacle. This woman did her hamburglar act two more times. She held back, waited for the case to get filled, then swooped in like a thieving bird and snatched all the sandwiches! And the staff let her!
So I had grapes for breakfast, and when we stopped for a gas fill-up a couple of hours later, I had a fig Newton, of which my wife ate half, "because that cereal didn't fill me up."
Tell me about it.
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