One more (small) dining adventure…

Saturday was day two of our trip home from Virginia. Normally, when we have a long travel day, we try to take breaks where we can get out and walk around a bit to loosen up. Often, we’ll stop at big box stores like Walmart or Lowes, a home improvement store. Sometimes, if we’re lucky or know where they are, we’ll stop at a shopping mall.

With the progress we were making on Saturday, I figured we’d be able to take a break east of Memphis at Wolfchase Galleria mall around lunch time.

What I didn’t fully take into consideration was the time of year and that it was a weekend.

It wasn’t bad getting off I40 and getting into the parking lot. We found a parking spot fairly easily, though we had to walk a ways, but getting in a walk was part of why we were stopping, even if it was in the rain.

Naturally the mall was packed. The food court was totally overrun and I didn’t see an empty table anywhere. All of the food vendors had lines in front of their spaces, most of them pretty small.

I suggested that we just walk the mall and then go find somewhere else to eat, but Karen felt that it would take just as long to go somewhere else.

I wasn’t worried about the time it would take. I just didn’t want the hassle of standing in line and then trying to find a place to sit.

We finally settled on the shortest line — a place that sold pizza and other “Italian” foods. The line moved pretty quickly and soon we were almost at the registers, when…

It was obvious they were trying very hard to keep things moving. There were two guys on the registers. Another fellow was passing food and drinks to the customers. As he was handing over a full drink between the two registers, the cup started gushing soda out of the bottom!

Apparently the cup was defective and wasn’t sealed properly. There was liquid all over the place.

Fortunately, none of our stuff got wet, but it ended up slowing things down.

Once we got our meal paid for, there was the challenge of finding a place to sit. All of the tables appeared to be filled and we made our way around twice through the table area before finding a place where a nice lady made room for us to sit by moving her bags out of the way.

The pizza was still warm… barely, but I can eat pizza at just about any temperature except cold out of the fridge.

Once we were done eating, we made our way around the rest of the mall — one level only as we had a bit of a walk out to the truck in the rain and four more hours drive to home.

We don’t normally go to malls on the weekends during the holidays — it’s a good thing we weren’t shopping.