Trip Report, Part 2

Bigger than a human head. Note the paper towels and bucket of silverware.

I’ll try to move us along a little faster with this road-trip recap. But I promise nothing.

So, we left Fantastic Caverns and made our way through the city of Springfield and out the other side, to arrive at Lambert’s Cafe, stop number two in the the Great Tourist Adventure.

As is my custom, I will now digress.

When I was a kid, we took a few cross-country car trips. Mostly, I remember my little brother puking on me multiple times, and I remember having to walk through a Stuckey’s rest stop/restaurant/gift shop to get to the bathroom to change my clothes.

I also remember the billboards for Lambert’s Cafe. And no, we never stopped there. But how do you not notice “Home of throwed rolls” on the sign? Even as a kid I wanted to correct the grammar.

Brilliant marketing strategy. It stuck with me all my life.

The point is, they wouldn’t stop. But you know what? When I got older, I drove back and forth across America repeatedly (often for no good reason), and I never stopped either.

So. When my friend Kate (Hi Kate!) said I should go there on the Crazy Kitschy Vacation of Campiness, I had to jump on it. I waited my whole life for this.

I’d been warned how insanely popular this place is, and that at peak times, you can wait an hour or two to get in. I planned accordingly. By the time we got to Lambert’s, it was about 2:15 in the afternoon. We went right in.

Everybody was super nice. Not like “highly trained professional servers in a five star restaurant” nice. No. More like “Hey, neighbor, come on in for a cup of coffee and a sammich” nice. And that was why we had a problem. But I’ll get to that.

People wander around this place with food. Not plates of food. Pots of food. And ginormous carts loaded with ginormous rolls. Which were, in fact, throwed.

See the picture at the top? Those were the drinks they served us. Enough soda to drown my enemies in, because the cup was bigger than a human head. Did you see the roll of paper towels behind the soda troughs? Yeah. Those were so we could defy the laws of space and time and start eating before we’d even ordered any food.

A guy with a Godzilla-sized pot full of fried okra came by and offered us some. We were, as you would expect, confused. We had no plates. We hadn’t ordered yet. He instructed us to tear off a paper towel. Then he piled fried okra on it. You’d think, since he was walking around with it, the food would be cold. Nope.

Then the roll guy came by. He kindly didn’t chuck his last roll at my head. So that was nice. Husband and I shared the roll, while roll guy went back to refill his multi-level roll cart.

Eventually, we ordered, and our regular food came to us. Our super-nice, welcome-to-our-house server apologized. They ran out of chicken, so they gave me the last two pieces. When more was done, she’d bring the rest out. I looked at my plate and felt a moment of fear. There was no way I could eat everything as it was. Plus, the fried-potato lady came over and put some on my already full plate. The black-eyed-peas and macaroni-and-tomatoes girls were easier to turn away.

But then, more rolls came out. The rolls were really, really good.

We’re going to digress again for a moment. Put on your digression helmets.

I suck at sports. P.E. class was a source of dread for me. My feet do okay, so dance steps, aerobics, that sort of thing, I’m fine there. Hand-eye coordination is non-existent. So, I was dreading the roll guy.

He had something I wanted. I wanted it bad. The rolls were so good. But he was throwing them. If I wanted a roll, I was going to have to catch it.

I weighed the pros and cons, and finally got my husband to catch a roll for me. We split it. The sorghum lady came around with a can of sticky stuff. We tried it. It was good.

I needed another roll. My husband refused to catch it for me. No. If I wanted it, I’d have to earn it.

Now, this would actually make for a better story, I think, if I either a) flew out of my chair and made a dramatic catch that stunned the crowd and garnered wild applause, or b) missed and got a black eye or had the roll land in my bucket of Dr. Pepper.

I think the roll guy took pity on me. He tossed it gently. I caught it. I split it with my husband, having lived through gym class one more day.

I’ve gone long for no good reason, so let me just tell you why the friendliness of the people nearly cost us our lives before we wrap this up for today.

We ate a lot. It was delicious. But we kept eating way past where we normally would have stopped. In a restaurant, you stop when you’re full. At someone’s house, you keep eating to be polite. Without realizing it, we felt like we were guests in someone’s home, not customers. We nearly ate ourselves to death.

Because the food kept coming. God help us, they just kept bringing us more food.

Fridge magnet number two in our fabulous tourist travels.

It finally hit me when I reached for the third piece of chicken (which she did, indeed, bring out later), bleary-eyed, weak, and queasy, that I realized why we were still plugging along.

We stopped eating.

We said no to dessert.

We lived to tell the tale.

On our way out, I felt smug as I stepped over a loose roll someone had dropped. I didn’t miss my roll. I’ll always have that.

Plus, I have the cool fridge magnet we bought at the gift store. See it?

We’re so close to Branson, now. I’ll be back Monday with Part 3.

See you real soon!