Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

"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.

Thanksgiving triplog #18
Camp Hill, PA · Sat, 29 Nov 2025. 9pm.

Today was Second Thanksgiving with my inlaws. It's kind of like being with Hobbits. ...I mean, in the sense of them having Second Breakfast, not in the sense of being around short people with hairy feet.

Second Thanksgiving happens because MIL and her longtime family friend, Lynne, both loving cooking. Each wants to cook a delicious Thanksgiving meal. So they agreed they'd take turns. One hosts Thanksgiving, the other hosts Second Thanksgiving a day or two later. 😅

Second Thanksgiving was at my inlaws' house. It was also a smaller party than Thursday. Beyond the 5 of us in the house (MIL, FIL, BIL, Hawk, and me) the only guests were Lynne and Dean.

What's on the menu for Second Thanksgiving? Well, since it's not really a traditional thing there's no expectation of it being about turkey. Which is okay with us, as I don't particularly enjoy turkey (though I'm okay with it) and Hawk really hates it. So MIL made a roast of beef that was deliciously tender. 😋

Right now it's a bit after 9pm, and I'm fading, hard. The company left a few minutes ago. It was none too soon for me as I was struggling to stay awake. Though now that I'm laying down for a bit I'm waking back up. I  might go back downstairs soon to hang with family as they unwind for the night.

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!

Were you the kind of cruel kid who watched seasonal cartoon specials like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and thought, "Mmm-mmm, that overgrown gourd's gonna make one hell of a good pumpkin pie when I kill it and bake it!" 😈 ...Okay, no, I wasn't that kind of cruel kid either. But now that I've thought of the joke I wish I were. 🤣

Anyway, tonight we were at Costco and found that now that Halloween is over, indeed the Great Pumpkin indeed was caught, killed, and baked.



Hawk and I were going to buy other kinds of sweets, probably his- and hers packages of cookies, but then we saw this huge pie— for a hugely cheap price. It's 2.5x the size of a typical supermarket bakery pumpkin pie for half the price.

You could easily slice 12 decent servings from this one pie.

We're not 12 people though, nor even 6. Since it's just the two of us I promptly parted the pie into thirds once we got home and packed two the chunks away in the freezer. The remaining one-third I left in the fridge.



...Well, minus one-quarter of the last one-third. That went onto my plate and into the microwave to warm up for dessert tonight.

There's a classic line from the 1975 movie Jaws. After the titular great white shark appears on the screen for the first time, actor Roy Schneider turns to the sailors hunting the monster and dead-pans, "You're going to need a bigger boat."

I'm not sure that line was all that big when the movie was first released in 1975, or even a few years later when it was making the rounds through theaters again and became popular among my childhood friends, but in recent years it has become a meme.



And, OMG, this movie is now 50 years old, and a throwaway, ad-libbed line from it is an Internet meme?

Yes, the line was unscripted. Behind-the-scenes stories tell us that the actors and crew were frustrated about the small boat used for filming scenes at sea. They felt the producers were being excessively cheap because the small size made it hard to work with given all the things involved in filming— the cameras, lights, microphones, and all the crew to operate them. "You're/We're going to need a bigger boat" became a running joke among the film crew, who repeated it every time the small watercraft made their work difficult to do.

Then actor Roy Schneider, playing the police chief in the story, ad-libbed the line during filming the scene where the great white shark, Jaws, appeared on camera for the first time. The cast and crew LOLed. Director Steven Spielberg thought it was funny, too— though without the guffaws from behind the camera. He worked it into the movie with some extra footage to set up the (now classic) line properly.

So, here we are 50 years later now, and this line just became relevant to me, personally. We're going to need a bigger fridge!



That's what I said to Hawk the other night after we'd ordered in pizza. Mine had come in an oversized box (hers was smaller). When I went to put the leftovers in the fridge, using the original boxes for simplicity sake, mine was a few inches too wide to fit into our generously sized side-by-side refrigerator!

Of course we didn't buy a new fridge. 🤣 I mean, the characters in the movie were facing a killer shark, and they didn't buy a new boat. All I'm facing here is half a leftover pizza. 🤣 I stacked the slices on a small baking pan and wrapped it in foil to keep for a day or two.

Phoenix Getaway travelog #6
Scottsdale · Sun, 21 Sep 2025. 10:30am

Last night we sat out on the patio of our casita until it was time for dinner. We enjoyed watching the hummingbirds come out as the sun began setting. At first it was one or two. Soon we saw at least 5 different hummers.

For dinner we decided to get food from the grocery store instead of visit a restaurant. We were still partly full from the surprisingly great taco-truck lunch we ate so we figured it'd be easier to eat lightly with stuff from the store. Plus, since this is the hotel I stayed at on a business trip a few months ago— though not in a room anywhere as nice as this— I remember a nice, high-end grocery nearby that sells plenty of ready-to-eat food.



My dinner was a couple dishes of sushi— albacore sashimi and a salmon-avocado roll— plus a few cans out of a six-pack of good beer to wash it down. (Alaskan Amber Ale is one of my top picks in the beer tasting I've done over the past few years.)

After dinner we considered going back out to the pool, perhaps even the hot tub, but we were both feeling kind of tired. So instead we holed up in our living room.



This is one of the areas where having a casita, or even a genuine suite, shines. There's all this space to sit. Or stretch out... not on the bed.

Sunday morning I began down here again. But then it occurred to me, "Hey, it's probably nice outside right now!" Indeed, at 8 in the morning it's only in the low 80s in Phoenix this time of year. 😅 So I went back outside to the patio to enjoy my breakfast.



Sorry, no breakfast picture here. My breakfast was just a protein bar, a few pieces of dried sausage, and a Coke Zero anyway.

After we both had a bite to eat this morning we walked out our gate over to the hot tub. Like the pool, it's just steps away.

Last night I saw other people using the hot tub searching around for the switch to turn on the jets. They were poking around all over the walls of that stucco cabana and couldn't find anything. That made me concerned the hot tub is broken and has no control. Well, this morning I looked around and saw a sign behind the hot tub "HOT TUB CONTROL" with a pointing arrow. Yay, being able to read. Though boo, the jets in the tub weren't very strong.

After a good soak in the hot tub (sorry, no pictures) we went over to the pool. The air was getting warmer but it was still a bit too cool to really enjoy the pool. So we sat on chaise lounges and enjoyed the warm air. It felt better stretching out on the lounge chairs than sitting up on the chairs on our patio.

Now the hour's winding on toward 11am, checkout time. Yeah, we could ask for a late checkout here, to enjoy this upgraded casita longer and have a dip in the pool, but we've got other plans for today. Bigger plans. Today we're moving over to the Hilton resort with a lazy river. An hour spent here in this bougie casita is an hour not spent floating around on inflatable inner tubes!

Canada travelog #22
Back at the hotel · Wed, 27 Aug 2025. 8am.

This morning we chose to eat breakfast in the room. No, it's not some sumptuous room service spread; it's groceries we shopped for last night and/or brought from home in our luggage. We bring our own because we're leery of hotel breakfasts. They're generally either cheap crap or eye wateringly expensive. Sometimes they manage to be both. For example, the breakfast buffet at the hotel near Toronto airport was $20 for bland scrambled eggs, lukewarm sausage, and an assortment of stale breads. And will they even have much we want? We're both picky eaters about traditional US breakfast foods.

On this trip the cost factor disappears. At Hilton Garden Inns I get breakfast for two for free as an elite status perk. So those bland scrambled eggs, lukewarm sausage, and assortment of stale breads are gratis. 😂 But we thought maybe we could do better shopping for ourselves. We bought a few items at the grocery store last night. Unfortunately the verdict this morning is that the grocery food is all bland, too. 😞 So tomorrow morning we'll probably switch back to the buffet.

It's odd that breakfast is weak here at the hotel as dinner was surprisingly on point. By the time we checked in two nights we were too tired to go back out— it had been a long day with waterfalls and waterfails—so we sat at the bar for dinner. Hawk had a plate of spring rolls as her meal with a slice of apple pie for dessert. I enjoyed a Caesar salad with grilled steak and a slice of cheesecake for dessert. Oh, and I washed it down with a couple pints of a local beer, Ambear Ale, and a glass of wine.

As much as we enjoyed dinner at the hotel restaurant two nights ago it was also spendy. I mean, not like financing options for DoorDashing a burrito spendy, but the kind of meal we only treat ourselves to maybe twice a month. So last night we went cheap. Like, fast food cheap. Ontario turns out to have plenty of franchises of one of my favorite fast food restaurants from back home, Popeye's. I enjoyed a chicken tenders combo with a side of freshly made onion rings. I don't think they've done fresh onion rings in the US for years now. And the combo was cheaper in Canada than back home— by about 25%. Wow.

Well, enough chatting about food. We've got another busy day ahead. Today we're driving down to visit Niagara Falls! That's the other part of why we decided to eat breakfast in the room. We figured it'd be faster, helping us hit the road sooner to have more time enjoying the falls.

Chicago Trip Log #3
Downtown Chicago - Tue, 12 Aug 2025, 6:30am

Don't hit it too hard the first night. That's one of my rules of sales trips. There's a temptation when in a new location, meeting colleagues I maybe haven't seen in a while, not being tired from a full day of meetings (yet), and  wanting to live it up after the many little ignominies of flying coach, that all contribute to eating and drinking too much and staying up too late the first night of a trip. I went into last night with good intentions... and feel like I mostly failed.

At first I thought I would enjoy a casual dinner and retire early to my picturesque corner room overlooking the park. I waited downstairs for a while to see if any colleagues might happen by who'd like to join me. One did... and she dragged me off to a steak house where a colleague of our had made a reservation. Good news: it's Bavette's Bar & Boeuf, a well regarded steak restaurant in Chicago. And the 5 of us there had a great time. And I enjoyed a few drinks without getting drunk. Bad news: I didn't get back until 11pm. And I'd eaten so richly that between that and the time zone change, I couldn't fall asleep until almost 1:30am. Even worse news: at 5:30am my body shouted, "Adrenaline, motherfucker!" for no goddamn reason and woke me up well before even my 6:15am alarm.

So, here I am.  I haven't even started the first day of 3 days of sales training, and already I feel like it's going to be a long slog. 😖

Update: Oh, at the restaurant I mentioned to one or two of my colleagues how happy I was with my nice room. They got corner rooms, too! Of course, they also made Club this past year— like I did. So maybe the upgraded rooms were doled out to us top performers, similar to when they sent a chauffeur in a $600,000 car to pick us up from the airport a few years ago.

There's a meme that when you were a kid, getting to eat at McDonald's was a treat; but now, as an adult, it's a fail. I was reminded of that last night when I ate at a McDonald's. It was my first time eating at one in over a year, I think. And it reminded me why I eat there less than once a year now.

First, a brief stroll down memory lane. When I was a kid, a family visit to McDonald's once every week or two was a treat. There were actually other fast food restaurants I liked better, but while I grumbled I never said "No" to the golden arches.

When I turned 17 and was more able to choose where to dine— as I was more often doing it on my own and not on my parents' dime— I steered away from McDonald's because of their racist advertising and their ability to rot the brains of my friends and all my younger sisters. Just mention the word "McDonald's" in a conversation, and they'd break out in song with one of the advertising jingles. It was like kids had been turned into  kids those dolls with a string on their back you could pull to make them say a recorded line. Or Pavlov's dogs slobbering at the chime of a bell.

But it wasn't all fast food I was frustrated about, just McDonald's. My last two years of college, for example, there was a Wendy's near my house that I ate at a few times a week. So the meme of then-vs-now still holds when read as "Going to a fast food restaurant" vs. specifically "Going to McDonald's."

But there's also an aspect to the then-vs-now comparison in which McDonald's, specifically, is a fail. I experienced that when I ate at one last night.

Put simply, McDonald's in nowhere near as enjoyable as it used to be. The food just isn't as good. The meat patties in the burgers look and taste like what school lunch cafeteria burgers used to be. Their look and texture both scream "filler", and the texture and taste both say "Cooked somewhere else, then reheated here."

The ordering experience is a fail, too. McDonald's steers customers heavily to ordering via computerized kiosks instead of from a human. I wrote a few years ago about how frustrating using McDonald's ordering kiosks is. Four years later it hasn't improved any. In fact it's gotten subjectively worse because now there's the concern the company is applying AI to manipulate the choices and prices presented to us in the menu to get us to spend more.

Finally, the whole customer experience at McDonald's is irritating— if you're savvy to the signs of cost-cutting. The ordering kiosks are one element of it. McDonald's wants to be able to staff fewer people relative to the number of orders, and eliminate the need for training humans to handle the complexity of taking orders from customers.

Then there's the recent removal of the self-serve soda fountains. Years ago they became commonplace as fast food restaurants sought to eliminate one of the tasks that took up employees' time. Now corporate has decided that self-serve refills let people drink too much, so they've moved it back behind the counter— where, BTW, drink filling is now completely automated. An employee just presses one button and everything— new cup, ice, filled with soda— is done by a robot.

The final insult is the signs in the dining room informing customers that there's a 20 minute limit to eat our food and get out. I know, this is a case of we-can't-have-nice-things because a small number of bad actors wrecked it for the rest of us. Like, I imagine corporate felt there were too many people buying a $1 cup of coffee and camping out at a table for 4 hours slurping up unlimited self-serve refills. But, gosh, what if I have an hour for my lunch break and would like to spend 40 minutes not just eating my food slowly but also relaxing while I read news and social media for a bit before returning to work. Lingering just a bit over lunch, when my schedule permits, has always been one of my little pleasures. Now the Man is warning me, "Don't make me tap the sign!"

Italy Travelog #29
BCN Airport - Saturday, 31 May 2025, 1pm

We landed at Barcelona airport a few hours ago. It's where we're making a connection on our trip home from Sardinia today. The flight here was easy; just a boring 90 minutes in an airplane. The leg home to San Francisco from here is a lot longer. It'll be a whopping 13 hours.

We're on the ground for a few hours in Barcelona so we've taken a tour of the airport, from one end to the other. That's not just because we have time to kill or because we want to stretch our legs before being packing into cramped airline seats for another 13+ hours; it's because we have to. Our arrival gate was at one far end of the airport, while our departure gate is at pretty much the opposite end.



As we cruised around BCN airport we found that it has a few outdoors patios. It's nice to have an opportunity at an airport to get outside for sunshine and fresh air. So few airports (*other than tiny ones) have outdoors spaces once you're behind the security cordon.

Alas, while these patios at BCN offer sunshine they don't exactly offer fresh air. That's because they're smoking havens. And the smokers are fucking pigs. Despite there being ashtrays every 5 meters the floor is basically one big ashtray. You can barely set a foot anywhere without stepping on cigarette butts.

The purpose of our exploration wasn't just to find our next gate. It was also to get lunch. BCN has a lot of places to buy a meal in its big central concourse. That's especially true if your idea of a meal is, "I absolutely love ham and Swiss, please show me 17 variations on ham-and-Swiss sandwiches!" 😅 Alas, Hawk doesn't like ham, and I don't like Swiss. That knocked out, like, 80% of the restaurants.

We did find two restaurants that served food both of us could enjoy. One was an airport-typical world-fusion restaurant with options that seemed fashioned to middle American tastes. We decided that would be our fallback restaurant if we couldn't find anything actually interesting. Then we found a Spanish cafe in one of those outdoor patios that sold a variety of empanadas.



Hawk picked a pair of veggie empanadas (left in the photo above) while I picked three different types (right): one chicken, one beef, and one pulled pork. We also split a plate of fries not pictured above. Oh, and I enjoyed a mug of German beer that wasn't heinously expensive. At US airports such a beer would often cost $15 nowadays.

Instead of beer being heinously expensive, you know what is? Sodas.



In a convenience store near our gate I spotted these soda and beer prices. A bottle of Coke is €4.59; a can of beer is €3.99. And that's no crap beer. That's Estrella Reserva 1906, a beer I've bought several times at home and found to be one of the best overall beers I've found. Granted, the beer is a smaller serving than the soda, at 330ml vs. 500ml. Still, it's a flip of the norm in the US to see any single of beer selling cheaper than a single of soda.

Another thing that struck my US eyes as odd today was this:



So, ham, particularly jamón Ibérico, is a big thing in Spain. Lots of stores at the airport are selling it. But this one is bold enough to insist that it's the best in the airport.

Best in the airport? Sure, I could believe that. It's way more plausible than one of their competitors claiming to have the best ham in the world. I mean, I'm not sure where the best ham in the world is but I'm pretty darn sure it's not in an airport. 🤣