Baaaaad Hamburger

Benbrook, Texas

Weather: low 21 degrees, high 40 degrees, clear skies

As the reader can see, the cold weather is hanging on. It did get a few degrees warmer in the afternoon, but it's plenty cold for me. Carolyn's loving it.

Do you ever have debates with your significant other about what the plans should be? Like, should we leave here today and move toward the hill country? Or, should we stay here another day or two while it warms up? After we debated those two little questions to death, we decided to stay here a little longer. Actually, I whined long enough about not wanting to get out in the cold in order to get everything ready to leave that Carolyn took pity on me. So, we're here for a couple more days. Sometimes, whining does work.

By the time we decided what we wanted to do, it was mid-morning. We went to the library in Benbrook, where I went through the magazines and bought an armload for $1.00. Before we left the library, I signed up for a library card so whenever we're in the area, I can check out books.

From the library, we went through part of the backstreets of Benbrook. This is a nice little town, with all the conveniences of a large city just a short distance away. The route we took led us back toward the park where we're staying, but we kept driving, checking out the area. The next stop was at Dutch Branch Park, which is a day use area on Lake Benbrook. Since they don't have camping at this park, we kept on driving, taking a back road toward Crowley. We found two other campgrounds on the back road, including Mustang Park and Bear Creek Park. I can't remember which one it was, but one of them only offered tent and dry camping. A beautiful little park, but not useful to us. Carolyn says camping to her is what we're doing now, having electricity and water, but not having a sewer hookup at our site.

We saw a lot of deer during our drive, including two big bucks with beautiful racks. The deer seemed to be looking for the sunshine, with a lot of them lying in the grass next to fence lines.

Eventually, we made our way back home, where I decided to try out the new waste water transport system, more commonly known as a "Blue Boy". The one we bought is a 25 gallon model. Does anyone know how much 25 gallons of water weigh? I can tell you by experience that it's really heavy, weighing more than 175 pounds. I emptied the shower tank of about 30 gals, and added another 15 gallons or so from the kitchen tank. That means I filled and emptied the blue boy twice. It wasn't hard to do at all, and was certainly easier than moving the RV to dump the tanks. As Carolyn will be quick to remind me, we should have bought the blue boy a long time ago. She's right.

Tonight, we decided to try out a fairly new bar-b-que restaurant at Cresson. The name of the restaurant is Tumbleweed Bar-B-Que. Every time we have been by there, the parking lot has been full. Since we needed a bottle of propane and the restaurant was on our way home from getting the propane, this seemed like a good time to stop.

The best thing I can say about what we had is that if you're going to a bar-b-que restaurant, don't buy a hamburger. As most of the readers know, we're always looking for the ultimate hamburger. The menu had an item for a Tumbleweed Hamburger, made with a half pound of twice ground brisket. Well, how could we resist that? I only wish we had. When the food came, the meat patty looked like it was about the size of a slider (know how small those are?), the meat was burnt, there were no condiments, and there was a huge piece of lettuce, a couple rings of onion, and one slice of tomato that was so thin I could see through it. When I say the meat was burnt, I mean it tasted like charcoal. This has to be the worst hamburger I have ever had, and Carolyn agrees. In addition, we were charged extra for french fries, and the catsup in a Heinz bottle was watered down. Want to take bets on whether we'll stop there again? I would be surprised if they stay in business another six months.

The question that can be asked is if I was so disgusted with the quality of the food, why didn't I complain? Simple answer: I was so ticked off, I didn't want to take it out on the server. My revenge is that I won't go back, and there's always the blog.

More later, be safe.

Today's Town - Buffalo, New York: Bison City

Not all who wander are lost.