We Can Always Turn Around!

"We can always turn around!"

Little did we know, this would be the motto of the whole evening.

It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. Me and my new friends i'd known for the last fourish years were in my hotel room, perusing restaurant guides for Springfield. I knew from the first moment we discussed dinner options that we'd be good friends; no one could decide what to pick ;)

After staring at the laptop screen for another few minutes, we decided to get in the car and wing it. We piled into the car and went left. We passed up Mike's Family Diner, as none of us are particularly fond of that sort of restaurant. That would be the last non-fast food, non-closed-down restaurant we would see for the next hour.

We drove for a while and ended up in a residential area. "We can always turn around," Angie said. And turn around we did. . . and that's when we noticed that there were more auto parts stores in Springfield than almost any other kind of business. We backtracked back toward the hotel and passed it by. We passed some more auto parts stores and wound up in another residential area. Time to turn around. This time we went right. . . right into the ghetto.

"Is that an O'Reily's?!" Rob asked. "That's two in five blocks!"

We twisted and turned and found ourselves near down town. Score! There's always good restaurants downtown, right? Wrong. Every time we spotted a restaurant, we also spotted the neon 'open' sign, and the fact that it wasn't lit. Somehow we twisted and turned our way back to the hotel.

I suggested we get on the highway. If nothing else, there's always restaurants listed on exit signs, and we could always pick one of those. So we got on the expressway, and within five minutes, we were out of Springfield and on our way to some other town. Unfuckingbelievable! We surrendered the expressway, and exited onto some random road. We drove straight on that road, flanked by corn fields and bars through a couple of small towns. By some weird miracle, we found we'd turned around again and wound up back at the intersection our hotel sat on. By this time, we just wanted something, anything edible.

Fuck it, we decided. We parked the car and hit Mike's Family Diner.