Posted: Wednesday, May 13, 2009


You arrive at your motel room and find out the room is hot and stuffy, the TV remote does not work, winter blankets are still on the beds and the air conditioning doesn't work. You open the window but there is nothing to hold the prehistoric land fill type window open. You turn the water faucet on in the bathroom and it has so much pressure it blasts you with water especially the front of your pants. Wow! Bin Laden probably has better conditions living in a cave and now someone is trying to be funny with the water faucet trick!

When we checked in we are given breakfast tickets and also a VIP card for dinner after attending classes all day. Did I fail to mention we had classes all day? Actually all day is considered 8 hours but we had to sit there for 9 hours! Can you believe that? The breakfast was classic. Absolutely classic, because if you did nothing for two solid weeks except study how you could prepare the worst tasting, poorest nutritional breakfast on earth someone has already beat you to it.

I used to say bring my eggs any way you feel like cooking them because I am not a very fussy eater, but after this experience I no longer feel that way. These eggs I am sure were imported from a former Bin Laden cave in Pakistan after he moved out several years ago. They were the most obscene, tasteless things on the planet earth. If they actually did come from a Bin Laden cave I'm sure they were the reason he moved out.

I could have fried eggs over a campfire covered with smoke twigs and a few bugs and stirred them with a stick and had more happy campers then there was in that chow line! Did I mention soggy French toast, bacon that was fried so crispy you could not get it out of the pan without some type of engineering skills and a very careful balancing act with a plastic spoon or fork?

Whatever happened to this eating healthier thing everyone is suppose to be on these days? Or did that all fall by the wayside as part of the stimulus package or was it carefully thought out. If you wrap a 3 ounce blueberry muffin up in 87 ounces of shrink wrap they will burn up hundreds of calories just trying to unwrap it and by then they will not have enough time or energy to eat the little grease ball. Probably just as well as I am told they have a nutritional rating of a -46. I am told they are about as nutritional as eating a Christmas ornament but a little harder. Just think of the improved eye to hand coordination you will gain by unwrapping one of these little monsters.

Imagine the phone conversation with your family from this prison camp, I mean motel. "How was your day?" "Great honey I set a new camp record today I unwrapped a blueberry muffin in less than 17 minutes although I still did not have enough time left to actually eat it." "The cook let me carve my initials in the bottom of it before wrapping it back up again and I can try again in the morning."

"Is the food really that bad there? " "Bad? Well, the ravens and sea gulls are not even in the parking lot here let alone sitting on the dumpsters!" "I saw a camp robber fly in from out of town yesterday and he dropped off some stolen egg material for the gulls and ravens to eat!"

"Good morning sir, are you here for the oilfield classes?" "Ah, no I am here to try and pry the syrup container out of that glass bowl." "Well good luck, that has not been out of there in years!"

I asked the waitress if she had anything I could put on my dry old stale toast and with a worried look on her face suggested I try ringing out a piece of French Toast. Try that piece over there she pointed because I put that one in there myself just four days ago. The others are still from last week! Imagine the reaction that had to a room full of people looking for anything that even resembled fresh food? Did I ever tell you about being in a pasture full of very hungry cattle when a gopher dug his way back to the surface after completing another escape route? Well, as he pushed himself up there was an old dry cow pie (cow dropping) sitting right over the hole he just dug! He pushed up and it flopped over out of his way and a blade of new grass sprung up from under that cow pie. The whole herd stampeded trying to get to that one blade of new fresh grass!

Imagine people hearing or seeing something that looked or sounded like fresh food at a place like this? I really hate to complain about things, but this was perhaps the worst breakfast I have ever witnessed in my life. Imagine the truthful answers these poor girls must get every day. "Good morning sir how would you like your eggs today?" "FRESH" "Did you see those big ugly birds circling the parking lot sir?" "Yes mam I did?" "I wonder what kind of birds they are?" "Those are vultures mam." "I wonder why they are circling here." Hello!

Imagine sitting in a classroom for 8 hours a day and then they bring in Don the environmental guy! One hour of talking to the whole tired and bored class and not one bit of useful information! Nothing! He might just as well have spoken in a foreign language!

In the same amount of time I could have set up camp and had fresh fish in a frying pan over a campfire instead of being tortured in Anchorage by some guy who must have been recruited from the homeless cardboard sign toting group at one of their street corners. How can you talk for 1 hour and not say anything useful or helpful to anyone! Don't get me started. I only have one day left here.

See you next week!

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