Damn am I ever glad to be home.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from Long Beach, Washington. The only difference between the small towns on the Long Beach Peninsula (especially Ocean Park) and those invented by Lovecraft is that Innsmouth didn't have a tilt-a-whirl.
Being a vegetarian in a small town is a harrowing challenge, so we prepared by googling restaurants in advance of our arrival, and coming armed with a GPS so we could find the culinary safe harbors.
For the life of me, I can't now find the webpage that had falsely indicated the quality of their fare, but I can only assume we got the names of restaurants crossed. I took a second sip of the murky stratified gelatin they called iced tea at "Bernie's Place", just to confirm for myself that it really was as bad as I'd just tasted. I've had insect repellent that more palatable. My regimen of injected antibiotics begins tomorrow. Here's my woefully inadequate attempt at describing the food: it looked like tater-tots, but when you broke it open, melted wax slowly oozed out.
I'm sure the same thing would have happened had the waitress's ancient head been similarly cracked open during our meal. No doubt the alligator man on display down the road at Marsh's Museum was a close blood relative of hers. I tried and failed this morning to make a Mii of our waitress - I could get the square jaw, the horribly deep wrinkles, the sickly yellowed complexion and the bulging froglike eyes set out at the distant perimeters of her noseless face, but I just couldn't find a way using the Wiis limited options to give her the bandages, vericose veins, gill slits and webbed fingers that her real-life counterpart had.
Fearful of the genetic damage done by two sips of sludge and a quarter of a plate of tater wax, we left in a hurry (tipping the endangered species in spite of our better judgment) and rushed south down the peninsula looking for beverages bottled far from the local water supply.
Given that Cthuluoid context, it's not the least bit surprising (though still every bit as sorrowful) that one of my dear friends went certifiably insane while we were there, and now clearly needs significant psychiatric counseling.
2 comments:
Additional details I wanted to include, but they didn't fit the Cthulhu Mythos feel...
#1: When we passed a restaurant claiming to have "brick oven pizza" that was "voted best on the peninsula" we bolstered our courage to try the local cuisine again. We should have left the moment we learned they use cheddar instead of mozzarella. I've tasted that crust before, just once. It comes powdered, and you just add water. You can buy it at Safeway in a tube big enough to make 4-5 large pizzas for $1.69. We bought it once, back when our financial situation was sketchy, and used it once, then threw the other 3.5 pizzas away. But on Long Beach, it's "best of the peninsula". Go Fig.
#2: Jake, I half-remembered you commenting about Jake the Alligator Man once. I couldn't recall if you had a Jake bumper sticker, or if you wanted one for your toolbox, but since I was already at the only location in the world where Jake the Aligator man bumper stickers are sold, and they were only $2, and I can't honestly encourage you to ever head that direction yourself, I figured I'd be a poor friend if I didn't pick one up for you. There's a sticker here waiting for the next time we're in the same city.
The following comment appeared in the rough draft, but has since been cut since it didn't match the Lovecraftian themes either:
"Which reminds me, I need to go look up Washington State codes, and see whether or not it was legal for her puppy to be running back and forth between the kitchen and the dining area."
The puppies name, I learned when she called to it while it tried to sneak out the door with us, was Bernie. Was the dog named after the restaurant, or the restaurant named after the dog?
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