Done with the DQ

Last night, my husband and I skipped town to go to Arkansas. GREAT choice. It's like 75 degrees and negative 5% humidity. Unfortunately, it does not look like I'm going to get to run in it. My foot is still being weird. Booooooooo.

The drive to Arkansas is not all that bad- only a little over seven hours. But what really makes the drive special is our regular stop to eat really horrible food that I can only justify eating on a road trip. It's the one perk of driving all that way and should be kept as a sacred tradition. I can only assume that I must have violated some covenant to reap the punishment I received over the next 30 minutes.

We stopped at Wendy's, and for some reason, I thought "Hey, I'll just order a salad." Big mistake. We first went inside, and saw that the line was way too long, so we opted for drive through just in time for a Suburban full of people to pull in front of us and order what must have been a hundred dollars worth of food off the value menu. We.....waited.....for...ever. Finally, we got our food and went on our way. A mile at a time, I started realizing all that had gone wrong with our order. No ketchup. No Salt. Four chicken nuggets instead of five. Wrong salad. BLT Cobb instead of Apple Pecan. But they didn't even get the BLT Cobb right itself. They left the bacon off! They left off the single most important ingredient! And of course it tasted ridiculous with the pomegranate vinaigrette. That's what I get for trying to be health conscious on a road trip.

I said out loud to myself, "The only thing that can make this okay is if I get a blizzard from Dairy Queen," just as we happened to pass a DQ. I was so stunned at the Kismet of it all that the only reaction I could come up with was to point and shout incoherently. That's what Blizzards do to me.

I thought my husband knew me well enough to understand that "eeeeeee! eeeeeeeee!" means "Hey, babe, do you mind if we stop at that Dairy Queen?" but apparently he thought it meant "Swerve or we'll die!" Oops. We somehow made it into the parking lot unscathed.

We pulled up to the speaker and waited......waited some more......."hello? Hello???" When we got to the window we noticed that the cashier had taken her headset off. No big deal. It's not like that's your only job or anything.

Husband asks: "So are you guys not taking orders at the speaker?"

DQ Girl: "Yes, we are."

Husband: Confusedly, "Oh, um, we tried to order back there, but I guess you didn't hear?"

DQ Girl: "Okay." Silence.

Husband: "Well, I guess we'll get a heath and butterfinger blizzard."

DQ Girl: Says nothing and goes to the blizzard machine where three other high school girls are helping each other make one blizzard at a time. This must be the DQ business model, because I have never made it out of one in under 20 minutes.

Blizzard in hand, I think that everything has been made right. I have control of my life. People are inherently good. All's well that ends well. Until I take a bite and realize that she put chocolate syrup in my ice cream.

THE HORROR! THE HORROR!