Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

After feeling like "All I've done is eat. And visit one customer," yesterday today I've visited another customer. And sat down to eat again. 😅 At least the ratio is decreasing: one customer visit, one restaurant meal before or after, not three.

Also decreasing is the ratio of meetings about meetings. That's almost entirely attributable to us not having our bosses want to get involved in this one. More people who want to be involved (and have strong opinions about how the meeting should be run) equals more meetings. Today it was just Sandi and I visiting a customer. We chatted briefly about it last night over dinner, aligned on a strategy, and agreed on one small task each we'd do independently to prepare. This morning there was no need for another prep meeting. So we didn't need to meet for breakfast. In fact, both of us still kind of full from yesterday, we both at a meal of a protein bar in our rooms. 🤣 And the meeting went beautifully despite our lack of 3 planning calls to prepare for it.

After the client meeting we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch. That, thankfully, wasn't a meeting so much as "We both need lunch, let's eat here rather than go to the airport and pay more for worse food there."

Now I'm at the airport. I'm plenty early for my flight... which is already falling behind schedule.



Yup, 30 minutes earlier this flight was tracking on time; now that I'm at the airport and through security, it's late. But, oh, UPDATE: now it's only 26 minutes late. A few minutes ago it was running further behind. The plane's now in the air en route to PHX so now there are fewer things that could go wrong to change the schedule.

I decided to try Chipotle for lunch yesterday. ...And when I say "try" I don't mean that it's my first time ever. I was eating at Chipotle back in the mid 00s, before it was cool. Long before Millennials were going viral on social media with how to hack the menu and ordering process to get double the meat for free. Frankly I was done with Chipotle by the time it became a nationwide phenom. It had already been going downhill for years by then. I've only eaten at Chipotle a few times since 2012. And my last time was over 5 years ago— when I risked my life for a bad burrito.  It's in that sense that I decided to "try" them again. Because, I figured, maybe they've gotten better. Maaaybe.



The local Chipotle looks mostly the same inside as it did years ago. No big deal there. I mean, I appreciate that it's clean. Some restaurants struggle with that.



I got myself a combo consisting of a carne asada burrito, a bag of chips with a side of queso, and a fountain soda. Except for the little dish of queso, this is similar to what I'd get at any taqueria. It seemed like a reasonable order until I saw the price....



$27 and change for this meal. Holy shit.

Okay, there are ways I could've made it cheaper. I could've skipped the chips and queso. Those added $5.15 plus tax. Though at almost any taqueria I'd get chips and salsa for free. At Chipotle even chips and salsa are a $2.75 add-on. And the guacamole on my burrito was $2.95. Over three dollars (including tax) for one scoop of guac??! Sheesh.

And here I've been fuming about a burrito, chips, and salsa at my favorite local taqueria inching up in price every few months to now $21 and change.

Oh, and for $27.xx the food at Chipotle was bad. The carne asada in my burrito was flavorless and cold. The dish of queso was bland and had a gritty, clumpy texture as it cooled— a sign that it contained a lot of filler/thickener. And everything was too salty.

I'll stick with the local taqueria for way better food at $6 cheaper.

"We could eat at Indian Sizzler," we've suggested to friends a few times recent. They've agreed to the Indian food aspect of it but figured we were making up the name. Like, it's an old Sizzler restaurant that shut down because its Boomer clientele got too old to drive, and now it's an Indian cuisine place whose name we can't be bothered to learn. But then we drive them there, and...



Yes, really, it's named Indian Sizzler!

And no, it's not a former Sizzler restaurant. Y'know, the family steakhouse and salad bar restaurant chain that was popular in the US in the late 1970s and 1980s. Yes, there were Sizzler restaurants in our area, but they folded up in the chain's 1996 bankruptcy. Or its 2020 bankruptcy. Or maybe one of its other bankruptcies or sales to new owners.

Speaking of once-common chains that are now defunct, this restaurant actually used to be a Bennigan's. That closed up years ago, and this spot has gone through a few other incarnations before Indian Sizzler opened a few months ago.



Indian Sizzler runs a buffet on the weekends. We've gone twice now this month, once for lunch and once for dinner. The buffet has plenty of choices, including a number of standard, Americanized Indian dishes, things like the butter chicken, chicken tikka, and mutter paneer you can see on my plate above. And there are also a variety of dishes that are not Indo-American standards. The sign out front mentions Sri Lankan and Indo-Chinese cuisine.... I spotted some definite Indo-Chinese dishes on the buffet. Sri Lankan, I'm not so sure about because I'm not sure which dishes, if any, are Sri Lankan. But I could believe there are a few.

The taste of the food is fairly standard for South Bay Indian served in a nicer restaurant. The setup hasn't fully escaped its former life as a Bennigan's, though. The layout of a grill-and-bar restaurant is apparent in how the tables and booths are arranged... and how at the center of the dining room is a full bar! 🤣

The bar winds up as mostly wasted space, an area it seems the owners weren't sure what to do with. Though they do offer cocktail service and have over a dozen beers on tap. Hawk has enjoyed virgin piña coladas there— so, yes, it really is a full bar, including a blender to make frozen drinks and the paper umbrellas to put in them. And last night I got a glass of Sam Adams. Her creamy drink and my beer were both good choices to cut the spiciness of Indian food.

"Where's the beef?" actress Clara Peller famously barked in a series of Wendy's TV commercials back in the 1980s. The commercials were such a success that the line became part of the cultural lexicon for years after. Kids would repeat it to each other and laugh, sort of like kids today do with "6-7", except that "Where's the beef?" had an actual, clear source— one that adults could understand, too. Well, I've been repeating the phrase again this past week, though with a bittersweet chuckle this time. The Wendy's restaurants in Sunnyvale are now gone!

It was in the news a few weeks ago that Wendy's is closing approximately 300 underperforming restaurants across the US. This comes after closing about 150 restaurants in 2024. (Example news coverage: CBS News article, 17 Nov 2025)

The last remaining Wendy's in Sunnyvale seems to have been part of this wave. The restaurant shut down sometime in the past week or two, I think. It's a few miles away and in a part of town I rarely traverse.

For a long time we had a Wendy's restaurant closer to home, just 1 mile away, on a street I regularly drive. In fact it used to be just around the corner from a spot where I worked for a few years!

That shop closed up during Covid, presumably a casualty of reduced business. The property changed hands, and they bulldozed the restaurant and put a bright, new Taco Bell in its spot. I've eat there once since then, just to remind myself Yeah, Taco Bell is kind of gross. 🤣

So anyway, now when I'm in the mood for a Dave's Old-Fashioned, I've got to travel miles to get one. A quick check on Google Maps shows there are four Wendy's still standing in San Jose, a couple in Fremont, and one up in Redwood City.

I'm not going to go that far for a Dave's Old-Fashioned, though. The main reason is they're just not that good anymore.

Oh, I used to love me a ¼-pound single combo years ago. Back in college, for example, a new Wendy's opened on a busy corner near where I lived the last 3 semesters there. It was right on my walk to/from classes. I ate there easily a few times a week. And it was good. Other Wendy's since then just haven't been as good. Even when that other Wendy's in Sunnyvale was right around the corner from my office, I ate there maybe once a month at most. And the one that just closed? I ate there back in March and was disappointed. The food was expensive, employees blocked off the cash register with a self-ordering kiosk, then they made my food wrong, and they barely cared.

Sometimes there's a reason businesses fail. I mean, there's always a reason, but a lot of the time it's not the macro trends that business owners routinely cite— things like the economy, Covid-19, inflation, minimum wage being raised, the skyrocketing divorce rate, or my favorite stupid excuse, "Millennials Are Killing the XYZ Industry". Sometimes, probably much of the time, the call is coming from inside the house!

Oh, you might still be wondering about that Where's the Beef? meme I mentioned at the start. Here's the infamous Wendy's TV commercial from 1984:



Enjoy!

Thanksgiving triplog #17
Mechanicsburg, PA · Fri, 28 Nov 2025. 2pm.

After my plans to see my cousins fell through today I was at wits' end for what to do with myself. Staying around the house with my pokey inlaws is stultifying. So I knew I wanted to go out. But... to do what? Today is Black Friday, so going shopping would be on brand... except there's nothing I want to buy. And trolling around stores on this supposedly busiest day of the year seems like it would be more frustrating. (I'm skeptical about whether it's the busiest day of the year anymore, but that doesn't change the equation that shopping today is likely to be more frustrating than enjoyable.)

Hawk seemed to be looking for an excuse to get out the house, too, because when I suggested I might go out to eat for lunch, she agreed to join me. She agreed to join me for pizza, even. We found a well rated pizzeria a few miles away and headed there first.

Getting pizza in central Pennsylvania was a bit of culture shock. The shocker wasn't the pizza itself. It was east coast style pizza, which is exactly what I expected... though maybe a bit bland compared to what I expected. (Pizza with my mom and sister a few days ago in Virginia was way richer.) The shocker was the price. A lunch combo with two slices and a drink was $8 for cheese slices, $9 for pepperoni. And the slices were huge. That kind of meal back home would be literally twice the price.

After stuffing ourself on more pizza than we believed we could eat we considered again going shopping somewhere. Hawk did have a bead shop in mind, so we drove over to that in Mechanicsburg's quaint downtown area. The old fashioned stores there were empty, and street parking was easy. We considered shopping somewhere again after that but decided just to go home instead. We'd had enough of a break from the house.

Thanksgiving triplog #12
Leesburg, VA · Tue, 25 Nov 2025. 12:30pm.

Hawk and I are road-tripping from northern Virginia to central Pennsylvania today. It's a day sooner than we planned to make this drive but we called an audible this morning after plans fell through. After packing up and leaving the hotel a day early we ran a quick errand a few miles down the road in Gainesville, VA then started our route north toward Harrisburg, PA.

Gainesville used to be a dot on a map, an exit off I-66 with a handful of fast food restaurants and gas stations for travelers. Now it's a series of huge strip malls stretching 2 miles long and a mile wide, with lots of big-box stores and restaurants. Oh, and shitty traffic to match.

We considered eating lunch in Gainesville. With so many restaurants to choose from (again, this burgeoning exurb used to be a rural crossroads) we figured we'd find something. One name leapt out at me: Roy Rogers.



Ultimately we didn't eat at Roy Rogers in Gainesville but did eat at one about half an hour north along our route, in Leesburg, VA. There are two Roy's in Leesburg. Along with the one south in Gainesville and one west in Front Royal, this is a region where you can find a lot of Roy Rogers restaurants. There are only about 40 Roy's now, so about 10% of all their restaurants are in this western-northern Virginia area.

Many of you reading this might be wondering, "WTH is a Roy Rogers restaurant?" The chain begain struggling and crashed in the 1990s through a series of acquisitions, mergers, and sales. At its height in the 1980s, though, it had 600 stores. When I was a kid and people were arguing about whether McDonald's or Burger King was better, I was like, "How about we go to Roy Rogers instead?"

As I walked into the restaurant I told the gal who asked to take my order, "Give me a moment to read the menu, it's been 40 years!"

As I thought more about when really was the last time I saw a Roy's I walked that 40 years claim back to 30 years. I definitely ate at Roy's a few times in the early 1990s, and I remember finding one to eat at on a road trip in the 1994-1995 timeframe. By then Roy's was already folding up most of its locations. I'm all but certain I haven't set foot in a Roy's since then.

So, how is it 30 years later?



Well, Roy's still has the "Fixin's Bar"! It's not as big as I remember, but it's still got all the goodness of being able to dress your hamburger yourself.

Curiously, Roy's didn't start as a fast food hamburger restaurant. According to its Wikipedia article it started in the late 1960s selling roast beef sandwiches. I think they may have phased those out years later as I don't recall seeing roast beef on the menu in my earliest recollections of eating there as a kid in the late 70s. By then they were mostly about hamburgers— and that iconic Fixin's (sic) Bar. Later they added fried chicken. But I always liked them for their burgers better than McDonald's and Burger King. Being able to dress the burger exactly the way I wanted it was an additional plus.

Speaking of the Fixin's Bar....



Today I dressed my burger the way I always did. A bit of lettuce, a few onions, mustard, and twice as much ketchup as I wanted because the ketchup pump still squirts out way the hell too much ketchup at a time. Even 40 years later some things don't change! 🤣

The burger wasn't quite as good as I remember. I don't know if that's because all fast food burgers have deteriorated in quality over the years as restaurants have sought cheaper ingredients and almost never cook them fresh to order anymore; or if it's because I have a more discerning palate now than when I was a kid. Probably it's some of both. Though one improvement in my lunch today was getting a side of onion rings with my burger. I don't remember onion rings being an option there back in the day. And these 'rings had thick, juicy hoops of onion inside a light fry coasting. Mmm-mmm!

Thanksgiving triplog #4
Manassas, VA · Sat, 22 Nov 2025. 9:15pm.

It's been a busy day today. We arrived early this morning on a red-eye flight having gotten maybe one hour of sleep, ate breakfast in a convenience store parking lot, and met friends for lunch and took a nap in a thrift store parking lot. And that was all before 3pm. Since then we've driven 45 minutes to another city, met more friends, had another meal with them, and then driven another 45 minutes around the metro area to where we've checked into our hotel for the next 4 nights.

Our dinner hosts this evening were Joe and Adriane, another pair of Hawk's friends from college. It's great that she has close friends she's kept in touch with. I've lost touch with all of mine. We met them at their house in Silver Spring, Maryland, where we've visited a number of times before. In fact the last time we saw them was pretty much this same day last year. ...Not the same numerical date but precisely "the Saturday before Thanksgiving".

Last year we went out to dinner at a nearby pub with Joe and Adriane, where I imagined my father may literally have drank beer with his college chums in the 1960s. But this year there was no pub-going. For one, Hawk didn't like their food. For another, I was still feeling fazed from a nearly sleepless night and didn't want to risk the sleepiness caused by even one drink of alcohol. So we ordered in Italian food and pizza and I passed even on the beer and liquor they offered me in the house. Me playing it safe turned out to be important because it allowed to spend several hours with them, chatting amiably in their living room, and still drive another 45 minutes on to our hotel for the night.

Now we're at our hotel for the night— tonight and the next 3 nights, too— in Manassas, Virginia, in the suburbs well west of Washington, D.C. What's in Manassas? you might ask unless you're from the area or are a Civil War buff. Well, for us, there's really nothing in Manassas. Like where we stayed on our pre-Thanksgiving trip last year it's a hotel location we picked because it's centrally located between places we planned to visit in the next few days. Though with a bunch of my relatives ghosting our texts and/or saying, "Sorry, something came up" I'm not sure how many of those plans will materialize into actual visits.

Anyway, it's late now, Or, rather, it feels late. It's 9:15pm and I am crashing, hard. The weight of last night's red-eye is really hitting me now. The parking lot nap I took this afternoon recharged me just enough to make it through dinner. But now my battery indicator is blinking "2%". Time to get to bed.

Texas Trip log #7
Back home · Thu, 13 Nov 2025. 9pm.

I'm back home now after a two-day trip to Austin, Texas. My previous blog, written at Austin's airport, may look like it's from just 4 hours ago, but it's from 6 hours ago because of the time change. Yeah, it was a long day already when I left. Now it's longer. What's happened since then? Well....



Yup, my flight was delayed. We boarded 10 minutes late, then it slipped to 20-25 minutes late by the time we actually departed.

On the plus side, Hawk's personal schedule for the day was running late, too, so she offered to pick me up at the airport in San Jose and go out to dinner together. The flight landed at 7:30, and I was in our car headed to dinner by 7:42.

On the flight I wasn't sure I'd have enough energy for dinner. It was late, it was a long day, and I thought I might just want to go home to bed. But being able to stand up and walk, breathe non-recycled air, and seeing Hawk again help perk me up.

As we drove off from the airport we discussed where to go for dinner. Hawk suggested Giovanni's, a favorite local pizza place. I countered with "How about something bland?" since I felt I'd had too much rich food the past few days. Then as we talked through it I realized that "bland" would be something like Denny's (ugh; already had it this year) I decided a pizza would be bland enough for me. 🤣

Now we're back home. I've unpacked my suitcase and I'm winding down for the evening. Actually I'm not just winding down I'm shutting down. I don't have mental bandwidth for anything else tonight. And as I look at what is on my calendar for tomorrow I see it's going to be an absolutely packed day, starting with a meeting at 7am.  It's just as well my meeting in San Antonio went remote (instead of in-person) and I had deftly booked alternate plans to fly home tonight. Well, at least by going to bed now it shouldn't hurt so much when I have to get up at 6:15am and start another full day.

I figured that Hawk would want to go out for dinner yesterday after getting her cast replaced with a boot that lets her walk better. I thought that would likely mean one of her favorite sit-down restaurants, Vive Sol or La Fiesta, or perhaps her favorite fast-casual place with great guacamole, Speedy's Tacos. Instead she announced yesterday evening, "I want pancakes. We could go to IHOP, or Denny's, or...."

I suggested we try IHOP if only because I ate at Denny's about 2 years ago and haven't been to an IHOP in possibly 10 years so it'd at least be a newer experience. But alas the nearest IHOPs are a few towns away, and in evening rush hour traffic the novely wasn't worth the commute. One of the remaining Denny's is just 1.5 miles away. So Denny's it was!



I went into Denny's with low expectations. Hawk wanted pancakes, and I figured they'd do a decent job of that. Eggs, too. But I didn't want breakfast all day. Heck, I don't even want breakfast food at breakfast hour. (I hate the taste of eggs and regard pancakes as carbs-and-sugar bombs my blood sugar level does not need.) I figured there may not be much else on the menu except for burgers anymore.

I wound up ordering a pot roast sandwich. It was small though came with a huge portion of fries filing out the plate. The meat on the sandwich was surprisingly tender. Hawk was surprised at how fast it was ready. I wasn't.... I figure it came in a boil-in bag from Sysco.

Toward the end of dinner Hawk's medications started hitting her pretty hard. She was feeling a bit dizzy and rested her head on the table. "It's good we went to Denny's," she quipped. "They're accustomed to people passed out with their faces on the table."

Today is Day 8 of Hawk's surgery recovery. The surgery was a week ago Friday. She's close to non-mobile, with one of her feet in a half-cast and unable to put any weight on it. For 7½ days she's limited herself to hobbling around the house with a pair of forearm crutches— and minimizing even that. But late this afternoon she decided it was time to Get Out.

The occasion was nothing grand. The impetus was that she'd just sold some books on eBay and wanted to get them shipped. I could've taken them to the depot for her. I mean, I'd already searched our Hobbit hole for an appropriately sized box, weighed the books (for postage), packed them carefully in the box, and printed and attached the mailing label. Driving them to the nearest postal counter open on Saturday afternoon— which wasn't even our city's lone remaining post office; it was the print-and-ship desk at an Office Depot store— was not a big ask. But I gather she was getting cabin fever after staying within these 4 walls for nearly 8 days. I understand.

I pulled the car around to the front door for her to hop in. She had her crutches with her for hopping, plus— in the back of the SUV— her knee scooter for wheeling around.

At the Office Depot she decided to hop as it wasn't too far. I carried the books box. It was compact but weighed nearly 20 pounds. Books can be heavy.

The dropoff at Office Depot seemed anticlimactic. All that effort just to hand over one box for shipping. So Hawk suggested again that we go out to eat for dinner. Cabin fever!

Armadillo Willy's Reborn 

We agreed on Empire Armadillo. For those familiar with Silicon Valley, Empire Armadillo is Armadillo Willy's reborn. The local chain Armadillo Willy's went out of business a few months ago. One local guy played the Victor Kiam "I liked the food so much I bought the company!" card and... well, bought the company's locations and equipment out of bankruptcy. Apparently he couldn't buy the name because that was held separately. But the restaurant in Sunnyvale is open again, same location, same food, basically the same recipes.

Except it's... also a bit better? The infusion of some new cash has let them upgrade a few interior fixtures that were looking long in the tooth. And the staff seems cheerful now, as opposed to the last time we went to the Sunnyvale location under the previous ownership a few years ago, when all the staff seemed mentally checked out out and the food was haphazardly prepared. That's why we stopped going for a few years. Anyway, now Armadillo is back, and they seem to be good again.