The $10.00 Hamburger and the Frozen Wasteland

No, it's not the title of the next Harry Potter book. It's the theme of my latest trip to Pennsylvania. Oh it started off OK, cold, but OK. That all changed yesterday. I crawled out of my hotel bed bright and early, showered and dressed, then turned on the TV to see that there was a "Winter Storm Warning". Bad news. But how bad could it be? I looked out the window to see that everything was covered in ice, and it was sleeting heavily at that very moment. Ice. Not snow. Snow is fun, you can drive on snow. No one ever made an "Ice Angel", no one ever has "Ice-Ball fights". Ice, for lack of a better word, sucks.

Nonetheless I loaded up my sweet Chevy Malibu rental car and proceeded to bobsled all the way to the airport. Ten miles in an hour and fifteen minutes. I was early, 6 hours early to be exact. I checked in, only two canceled flights, things were looking up. Somewhere around hour number three at the airport they announced that they were no longer going to scrape the runway. Bad news, yet again. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that nothing was going to leave the airport on a plane. So I called a hotel, no rooms, another hotel, again no rooms. Finally I managed a reservation and asked when they could come and pick me up in the shuttle. "We don't want to risk anyone's life, it's awful out there" was the answer they gave me. So, how about a taxi? No dice. Not a single one. This is Pennsylvania for crying out loud. Not Arizona, not Hawaii, Pennsylvania. YOU'VE SEEN THIS BEFORE. Oh I was told that this was the first storm of the winter, but I've got this crazy feeling that some of the people that live in Penn State are more than A YEAR OLD. Maybe the bitter cold of this place affects long term memory, I don't know. So I book a rental car, a Cobalt this time. I walk out to the car, step in a hole that lands me knee deep in snowy, icy, slush. Oh, did I mention that it had actually began snowing at this point? Keep that in mind. I get to the car, unlock the door, and it's frozen shut. That's right, frozen shut. So I go to the passenger side, open the door, bend over to load up my luggage in the back seat because THE TRUNK WAS FROZEN SHUT, and proceed to have what felt like five pounds of snow fall directly down the back of my pants and into my crack. Do I have to tell you what a massive load of frozen water in your crevasse feels like? I didn't think so. So I crawl over the console, get in the drivers seat, fire up the Cobalt and get ready to ride. NOT SO FAST. Some carpetbagging yankee had pulled both windshield wipers straight up. I try to open the drivers door from the inside. No deal. So, I closed my eyes, collected myself, and waited for thirty minutes until the door unfroze.

I took off for the hotel, checked in and went to the room. Around supper time I thought that I'd go and grab a bite at the hotel restaurant. For those of you who don't travel often, take this advice: Hotel restaurants blow. The food is way, way over priced and is almost always the worst food within fifteen miles. I check the menu, extremely overpriced. 10oz New York Strip=$30.00. Club Sandwich=$10.00. So I limit my options to the hamburger (a 10.00 venture) and the Philly cheese-steak (also ten bucks). I ask the waitress which she preferred, to which she replied "Oh the Hamburger!". Sounds promising. I ask for it to be medium-well, with cheddar and grilled onions. Forty-five minutes later, I received what looked like a burger, on some tricked up, stale, roll. I notice that there are no grilled onions on it. I also noticed that it appeared that someone had managed to slice cheese that was only one millimeter thick, an impressive feat. I asked the waitress about the onions, she looked lost, so I said never mind. Then I notice that I have no mustard, mayo, ketchup, not even a package of sweet and low. I ask for mustard. I'm brought a tub of some of the most non-mustardy mustard on this planet. Mustard is yellow. I know this because I've eaten mustard for going on 25 years. This was brown. Don't tell me about dijon mustard, because that doesn't qualify. Anyway, I put it all together, took a bite, and dust shot out the end of the burger. It was more than well done, it appeared that it had kissed the sun at some point. I ate what I could of the fries, paid out, and resigned myself to a night of hunger and cold.

But now, as we speak, I'm in the airport. Flights are leaving, and I'm bound for Cincinnati, then Dallas. I'll be there soon...just not soon enough.