Express Breakfast Buffet

The Holiday Inn Express, as you might guess, has an “express start” breakfast bar in the lobby. Like their coffee machine, it’s complimentary, but unlike that Keurig in our room, it didn’t say anything nice to me one way or the other. But it was definitely calling my name. Although I’m a “foodie” and constantly plotting what I’ll cook or where we’ll go to eat (I’ve normally got plans a week out on an Excel spreadsheet.) I wanted what that bar had to offer. Bad. Lots of different kinds of coffee in pump thermoses, under-ripe bananas and oranges, “three minute pancakes” from the “never touched by human hands” special three-minute pancake maker. And there, center stage, shining like the big stone in a diamond ring, sat the hot bar. Cheap greasy pork sausages like the fingers of a fat man who had floated face down in a retention pond for a week or two, biscuits next to a tub of sausage gravy, made from those same perspiring fingers, sunning themselves too long under the heat lamps and frequently sneezed on by patrons who seem to hold it in until they lift the Plexiglas shield. The star of the show, a large deep-dish pan of scrambled eggs. Dehydrated, flaked, reconstituted, formed…that certainly had never met a chicken. The orange juice dispenser held juice made from concentrate made with a bad orange in there somewhere, or maybe the whole batch was turning on itself, effervescent. It’s not supposed to be fizzy, right?

Anyway, even though I should be embarrassed to admit that I love that stuff, very early in the morning with lots of black coffee, I’m not, and I do. It makes me feel like I’m at a realtor meeting but I don’t have to go to work afterward.