Road Trip Review Check-In 2 (Patreon)

Only the most important of dispatches on a journey across the US.

Day 2

Safeway Strawberry Cereal Breakfast Bars: Very tasty, but VERY dry. Not a good road food because it has to be paired with a drink and then you have to make rest stops... Good to eat while at the hotel though!

Trader Joe's Dried Baby Bananas: It's like all the flavor of a banana compacted into a chewy food pellet. It tastes like the future

No more tree fires, but met some brush fires. It's damned hot and dry out there. Things nigh-spontenously combust out here so it's a given.

The south-west feels like America's padded essay. There's quality information in there, but it's most definitely double-spaced and the margins are padded. Arizona is beautiful... but does it really need to be that big? I posit, no.

Also, Arizona's roads are horrible. Both in condition and the amount of work zones with questionable work being done. Sure you get to drive 75, but at what cost.

I ate a Taco Bell Chicken Supreme burrito. It tastes exactly as I remembered. None of the ingredients have any distinct flavors, so every bite just tastes like taco sauce. There was a deposit of onions at the bottom so the final bites were a surprise. What happened to the cost of Taco Bell though? The whole thing with them was that you could get a burrito for like a buck so you could get a bunch of different things for $5. Now, a burrito alone is $4 with tax. I could get real food for that.

Also, a tour bus pulled in as I started eating. That joint Taco Bell/KFC was not prepared for an onslaught of foreign tourists whose limited English did not seem to include the differences in what kind of chicken comes in various buckets. They seemed happy though. I didn't stick around long enough to see if they were horribly disappointed in how American KFC ranks against overseas KFC. I hear it's actually pretty good on other continents and North America just gets the cheap stuff.

As stations were coming in and out, I heard dueling pledge drives for public radio and a religious station as the signals swapped in and out. That's a pretty great mash up.

Bless you radio station that decided to play "Thriller" mid-way through Texas. You are a hero and that's exactly what was needed.