Today I start heading northwards, stopping at Santa Barbara for lunch. Santa Barbara is an upmarket looking town with Spanish influenced architecture lining the high street. However, there are quite a lot of teenage loiterers, as well as young women dressed in very short shorts. Disconcertingly, many of them seem to be walking around with their mothers.
Further north, I decide to stop for the night at another Santa something, though this isn’t one of the well known ones, it being a town of shopping plazas. There is a rodeo nearby this weekend, and the motels are busy, though I manage to find one for $44 including tax. There aren’t too many countries in the world where you can find an en-suite room with a comfortable double bed and a TV for this much, though the Best Western wanted to charge me almost $100.
Across the road from my motel is a self styled ‘saloon dining house’, which looks like my best bet for dinner. When I go in, it is clear that they don’t get too many Brits here, as the young waiter looks at me with polite curiosity when I speak to him. He tells me that soup and salad comes free with the main meal, but I am quite hungry so I order a burger. When I get the soup though, I start to think I might have been over ambitious, as it is a thick beef and vegetable soup served in a pot the size of a large saucepan. This is big enough itself to be my main meal, but just in case it comes with a bowl full of spicy Mexican beans, to be mixed with salsa if you so desire. By the time I am finished with the soup, I am reluctant to even look at the burger I will be presented with. I had forgotten about the salad, but it comes out after the soup dripping with dressing, which is how I was brought up to eat rabbit food anyway.
The burger is presented to me and looks quite frightening. 14oz – that's about 400 grams you metric types – and that doesn’t include the masses of cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickle etc piled on top of it. Just in case I didn’t have enough to eat, there is a hefty side portion of Tex-Mex rice and round fried potato slices. I like American beef, even if it is mostly factory farmed, and I feel it is a challenge to try to finish the burger, although I am now having to loosen my belt. It is delicious, but I can’t finish it. It is a good thing that I didn’t order the appetizer I had been considering, which was listed as four large prawns served with eight ounce steaks bits. Eight ounces of ‘bits’?
I had started to think what a bargain this was at $15, and enough to feed three reasonable appetites, when the waiter collects my unfinished meal and feels obliged to tell me that dessert is also included if I felt like having anymore. I feel the urge to spontaneously combust.
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