On The Road

So last week I stayed at the Best Western in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  It’s really a very nice place to stay, with an in room refrigerator that worked, wardrobe/entertainment center, high speed internet, and its own leather office chair (which I’ve never seen before at a hotel so I was pleasantly surprised).  Now I’m sure there are more worldly travellers out there who would chalk this up as either sub-standard or just a good enough reason to stay there.  However, the REAL attraction to the hotel was not what was in the room.  It wasn’t actually in the hotel itself… it was actually attached.

It was Bickford’s.

Bickford’s apparently is a New England restaurant chain with a breakfast menu to die for.  How do I know this?  Because there are actually two Best Westerns in Portsmouth (or the county or something).  Our original reservations were at the OTHER Best Western.  My parents were in the area a few weeks back and saw THIS Best Western.  Dear old Dad however could NOT pass up the opportunity to stay at a place ATTACHED to his Mecca of Breakfast.  So they changed hotels.  No big deal right?

Whereas the other Best Western had a normal street address, this was on Highway 1 Loop by the Highway 1 Bypass.  That was as good as the address was getting… so I plugged it into the GPS and it actually came up.  Now on the drive up with my brother, remember we had 55 gallon drums of rain pouring onto us, we decided we would have the famed blueberry pancakes we always hear so much about.

So when we got off the exit, we hit the Loop and could actually see the hotel through the fog.  That’s when the GPS went nuts.  First it had me take the Bypass, then it had me make a U-Turn, then it had me get into the Loop which I could have just gotten into from the highway… and that’s where things went real bad.  If you’ve ever seen Chevy Chase in European Vacation there’s a scene where he is stuck in a rotary driving past Big Ben and Parliament.  He can’t get left and ends up driving around for most of the day and into the night.  I could just not get right at the correct exit for this hotel.  I must have gone around 6 times before finally driving cross grass onto a road that led to the driveway of the hotel.  GPS… still telling me to drive in circles.  On the bright side… it was not driving me underwater.

Let’s fast forward past all the family hellos, greetings, and them trying to shove leftover dinner scraps down the gullets of my brother and I.  The next morning I met my parents in Bickford‘s.  My father was engrossed in was was probably his 5th cup of coffee with a purple smear across an empty plate.  The waitress came, and I ordered the blueberry pancakes as I had planned.  That’s when I got the news.

My father had eaten the last of the blueberry pancakes.  They were expecting more in later that day, but there were no more.  Sullenly, I changed my order to a Santa Fe omelette as visions of dreamy purple sauce lingered in my head.  The waitress walked away, and my mother said to my father, “See, you had to get TWO orders didn’t you?”

Not only had he eaten the last of the blueberry pancakes… he had eaten the last TWO orders of them.  For a brief moment… I had visions of pouring ipecac down his gluttonous throat.

And my parents actually wonder why I don’t go away with them more often.  Really now.