Day Trips, Pie Fights and Body Shaming - Oh My!

This week I went on a half day color tour sponsored by the senior hall. They’ve been offering these mini fall color tours for 4-5 years now and they were my suggestion so I feel like I have to keep supporting them. Not that I’d really have to…they’re wildly popular and they always book 125 people plus a long wait list. Each day for five days they take twenty-five people on our mini bus which is like traveling in a tin can if you're grading vehicles on their safety elements. Never let it be said that I can’t live dangerously. They have an annual longer color tour that last 14 hours and they take 100 seniors on two motor coaches up north to wine country. I went on one of those trips once but it was too much riding, too much looking out windows at a blur of color and too much stopping at places to eat or shop and too much time to leave the dog home alone. 

The mini trips go to a small town in the area---a different one every year---for lunch then they take in a few designated natural beauty roads before stopping someplace for dessert and to shop a place that sells consumables like a bakery or farmers market. This year, they threw in a hay ride. Maybe it’s my cataracts, but I have not been impressed by the fall colors this year. Where were the deep raspberry reds, the neon yellows and the god-awful pumpkin oranges? (Long time readers here know I have a pending court case against the color orange. Nothing short of removing it from the color wheel will please me.)

On this trip we ate at a place I’ve been to a few times, it’s in a small hamlet with a handful of businesses all owned by the same person. It has two restaurants---one with a bar, a gas station with some groceries, a wine store and butcher shop. A few of the buildings are vintage having been there since the days when they had a working grist mill. The place is only 20 miles out in the boondocks but on a busy crossroads so the little hamlet is thriving and popular. We preorder our meals so there’s no waiting around for Susie or Mary down the table to make up her mind between the Cannonburger, the smelt, the brisket or the strawberry spinach salad. I love that aspect of going on these trips.

Next we stopped at a covered bridge for a “photo shoot.” It cracks me up that cell phones have changed how we take pictures at historical places. No more do we try to get a long range view of the beauty around us. Nope, even the seniors were taking selfies by the bridge. Our next stop was at a farm that has a corn maze and hay rides. As hokey as that sounds the hayride was pretty neat. It went by a pond, alongside the corn maze, through a field of pumpkins and up and down huge, muddy hills in the woods that reminded me of being out west in the mountains with my husband. He loved getting stuck in the mud where he’d have to use the come-along winch on the front of the truck to get us out. Me, I liked the long showers and hot sex back at the motel afterward better than the days playing in the mud. After the hayride, we went inside their produce sales building where many of the ladies stocked up on zucchini, pumpkins and squaw that rolled around on the floor of the bus.

Then we stopped at another small town where people with the deep pockets live. Its business district has been recently revamped and doubled in size to attract the tourists, I’m guessing. The newer buildings aren’t even occupied yet but our destination restaurant where we had dessert is well established and well known for its bakery goods. As I sat there watching the waitresses bring out to out to-die-for slices of chocolate cake, carrot cake and plum crumble with ice cream they finally got around to serving the lemon meringue pie that I preordered. And let me tell you when I looked at that meager piece of pie in front of me compared to the slice of pie the woman across the table from me got, I felt like a ten year old ready to bellow out, "Ma, she got more pie than I did!" Her piece was a good inch wider and longer. The women is a little elf of a person and I’m not proud to say this but it crossed my mind that Ms Twiggy, the waitress, was making a body shaming statement by giving me the smaller piece because I’m over weight and don’t need the sweets and elf-lady does.

Then the adult-me pushed the child-me back in her place and adult-me decided not to let the Pie Disparage spoil an otherwise delightful day. But as you can see by reading this, here it is a day later and I’m still---pouting? Not letting it go? Sharing the incident for blogging fodder? You decide but I like it when life is fair even though we all know it doesn’t work that way. I’m just glad I haven’t gotten so old that I’ve lost my impulse control filter because it would have caused quite an embarrassing scene if I had snatched Elf-Lady’s pie and exchanged it for mine. Instead I did what a lot of people with food issues would do, I bought a chocolate chip cookie on my way out and ate it as soon as I was alone...as if that showed the waitress who was really in control.  ©