The pathetic truth is that I had never eaten at a Waffle House so we hit the one down the road for breakfast before heading out to Six Flags. It was more than I could have expected but I hadn’t expected much. I was pleased to discover that everything is actually made to order with real food. Like, a man cracked eggs onto a griddle; a woman poured waffle batter onto an iron and hash browns were smothered, covered and chunked with real gravy, cheese and meat. Most of the time, when you hit a rest stop chain, you know that somewhere, off behind swinging doors, a hair-netted Mexican is nuking and plating a
Side note: we stopped off at the WH for coffee to go a few days later and were pleased to discover that their large easily holds about 3,256 oz of java. Throw a couple shots of Jack in there and you’ve what I like to call an Antebellum Eye-Opener. Yee-hibbity-haw!
We specifically ate a huge breakfast so that we wouldn’t be hungry at Six Flags. Five dollar hot dogs are even less appealing than two dollar hot dogs. So for lunch we had ice cream. Oh yes, ICE CREAM. A big fat cone of ice cream. FOR LUNCH.
Dinner was all about home cooking. Sue’s supper blew Watershed out of the, well, water. It was a testament to her skill that I managed to eat as much as I did. My brains had been so scrambled from riding every coaster in the park, including the original Great American
After dinner, John and I hit the local liquor store and Publix to stock up on booze and groceries for our trip to his sister’s place in Warm Springs the next day. John had promised her an Edith-cooked meal as a belated birthday present. Luckily, Edith was happy to oblige. The only thing I had to do ahead was my Tequila corn salsa. After that was assembled, John and I enjoyed a bottle of Framboise at the kitchen table and then I pretty much passed out. Sun, Six Flags and carbohydrates will do that to a girl.
John got Gran-Gran up and we ate breakfast together before hitting the road. Sue had defrosted a container of the late Papa Summerour’s peaches (picked, skinned, stoned, sweetened and frozen in bulk before he passed away last year), thinking I might like to have them on my cereal. I did like. The tree in their garden yields babies about the size of golf balls. Gran-Gran told the story of how Papa sat in the livingroom and peeled all the peaches (several hundred) by himself with the very same widdling knife I’d used the night before to prep a Vidalia. John told the story of how his dad had fallen off the ladder while helping Papa get the peaches off the tree.
I think the Bulloch House might be singularly responsible for the obesity epidemic currently sweeping across this great land of ours. When food tastes THAT good, and it’s THAT cheap, you feel almost obligated to keep eating. I really need to work on my buffet technique if I’m ever going back there. I still make the all too common error of overloading the first plate for fear that everything will be gone by the time I go back for seconds. Such was not the case at the Bulloch House where fried chicken seems to apparate (accio poulet!) every five minutes. But when you’ve never been to a Southern buffet before and you’re paying a poultry—whoops,
The buffet included crispy fried chicken, creamed potatoes with little flecks of skin in ‘em, fresh stewed squash, roast pork loin in brown gravy, something they were calling “chicken and pasta” although it looked more like corn-starch thickened chicken noodle soup (probably the only loser on the steam table), the most delectable little flaky biscuits AND corn bread AND yeast rolls; fried green tomatoes, fried apples and a salad bar just in case you found yourself feeling French.
