Umm, yeah, I don’t think we’ll be going there again…

Josh and I have been working in the yard pretty much every day until it is too dark to see. We finally came in at about 9pm today, and we hadn’t eaten since we got up and we were very hungry. We didn’t feel like cooking anything, and we didn’t want our usual delivery options because we’ve been overdoing them lately (what with all the late yard-working nights). So we decided we’d finally try out this little Mexican restaurant that is only a few streets down from us. We’d never tried it yet, and we pass it every time we go out. We figured that since it is like two minutes away from us it would be a quick and easy way to pick up food to take home and eat. It wasn’t. Man, it wasn’t. 🙁

We hop in the car in our slippers, leaving the dryer going and the lights on at home. Our stomachs were growling, and we were tired and achey. We couldn’t wait to sit down on the sofa and eat while watching tv. We arrive at the restaurant, and we’re very pleased that it has a drive-thru so we don’t have to get out of the car. We pull up to the menu (all hand-written, complete with lovely errors such as all the “Roll Tacos” they offer) and try to decide on what we want to eat. We figured we’d order enough for dinner and then for our breakfast tomorrow. We sat there perusing the menu at our leisure, and long after we’d decided what we wanted, still nobody had arrived at the window or attempted to contact us. Josh rolled down his window and pressed a weird button-looking thing. Still nothing happened, so he leaned out and rapped on the window. Finally a girl appeared and opened the window. She didn’t say anything. So Josh said “We’d like to place an order…?” And she said ok.

So Josh starts telling her what we want, and she just stares at us. Then she attempts to repeat it back when he finished, and she had it all wrong and was forgetting stuff. There was no cash register in sight, not even a notebook and pen for her to write down our order. So basically we’re at her whims of what she will decide to cook for us. I had tried to order 1 chicken flauta and 1 beef flauta, and she said they have to be both of the same kind, so I said I’ll take 2 chicken flautas. Then Josh said he wanted 2 chicken flautas too. And I ordered a hamburger, and a carne asada burrito combination plate. Josh also ordered a California burrito combination plate and 2 fish tacos. We asked what made it a “California” burrito and she mumbled something that sounded like “rice inside”. We didn’t see how that made it particularly Californian, but whatever, it sounded good.

After we ordered she left for a while, and we’re still sitting there, with the car idling. We were getting more uncomfortable by the minute, seeing as the patrons of the “world famous” bar right next to us kept pulling up in their cars and sitting there, not getting out or doing anything except playing musical cars. One person would get out of one car and go and sit in another. We saw this happen a few times. Or people would be aimlessly walking around in the parking lot. Meanwhile, we’ve been sitting here a long time, and we’re hungry.

Josh pressed the weird button and she appeared right away this time. He asked if our order was almost ready. “Yeah, it’s almost ready”, she said, and walked away. This has been about 15 minutes of us sitting there in the car, still with the engine idling. She comes back after a while, and Josh rolls down his window. “It’ll be $30.67” she says. We’re thinking “What??!!” Their prices must have drastically changed since they wrote the menu…But since we’re almost shell-shocked from sitting there so long, we hand over the money. As we thought, no receipt to be found. She goes away with the money. We’re wondering if we’ll EVER see our food. Or our home again. She comes back, opens her window, looks blankly at us and says “Um. What was I going to say…” all slow and lazily. We blink at her. We have NO idea what she was going to say, so sorry, we can’t help you. Then she recollects and says all bored-like: “If people order over $20 we give them a free soda”. Ok, cool, I thought! Josh wasn’t sure what she said we’d be getting, so I said “I think she said soda” (he thought she said “sunburn”) so he cautiously repeated to her “we get a free SODA?” and she said yes. We chose a Dr. Pepper.

We were both so thirsty from working in the yard all day, and we hadn’t brought any water out with us today, so we were especially thirsty. My throat was all dry, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a tall, ice-filled Dr. Pepper. She came back to us with a can. Sigh. At least it was cold! I opened it right up and Josh and I took turns guzzling it. Dr. Pepper is not guzzler-friendly. I immediately had to pop up several frothy burps that hurt coming up my esophagus, and tingled my nose. They sounded funny too, and had Josh cracking up. But then he felt the wrath of the foamy burps, too, and then I was laughing. And the burps just kept coming out WHILE I was laughing, which had us laughing even harder! We were VERY easily entertained by that point because we were numb with the horror of thinking we could just pop out to the little Mexican restaurant down the street and be back home with hot food in like 10 minutes or under. We seriously thought that could happen. This was at around half an hour of sitting in our idling car.

We were almost .Almost. contemplating just driving off without our food or our money because we were so weirded out by the whole thing. I mean, we really thought she’d forgotten about us. Finally, FINALLY, at some point in our lives she came back. She had a bag of food. Yay! We could go home and eat and relax. We hoped she got everything right, but just wanted to high-tail it out of there so we didn’t stop to check. I think we honestly didn’t want to stick around for her to fix anything if there were mistakes, because it would have probably been five in the morning before we’d get home at that rate. We had arrived there at around 9:40 pm. We got home at around 11pm. Huh? I felt like we had a time warp, because I thought we were picking up fast food. I guess that drive-thru window was really deceiving us. I think they were having a time warp too, because the calendar we could see on their wall was open to April. At least it was 2010, but still. And that was hanging right next to an upside-down poster for CPR instructions. Be pretty tough to administer CPR standing on your head, but if that’s how it works for them…well, remind me to never eat at that restaurant. Wait, I don’t need reminding…I KNOW I won’t be going there again.

We walked into our kitchen when we FINALLY got home and started putting our food on plates. I couldn’t wait to dig into my fat carne asada burrito! But where was my burrito? It wasn’t there. 🙁 She had just dumped a couple of spoonfuls of carne asada on the plate with rice and beans. No burrito. 🙁 Josh said I could share his California burrito, though, and that made things better. After all, it was carne asada too, but with the addition of “rice” inside. We thought. Oh, I was looking forward to the hamburger, too. But NO hamburger. Nope. Not even a bun with nothing inside. No hamburger. That’s what we get for ordering at a place with no cash register, and an employee who walks over to tell us she forgot what she was going to say before we even knew she was going to say anything at all. She didn’t need to tell us, really, because we would never know she had even wanted to say anything. But I’m rambling. (That’s what I get for writing this at 4 am.) Oh. And we discovered why our total was a ghastly $30 (at a ghetto drive-thru?!) –she, in her infinite and arbitrary wisdom of our dimly-remembered order (she knew flautas were floating around in our order somewhere…), had given us EIGHT chicken flautas. Wow. What happened? Wow. That’s all I can say. Oh well, looks like we’ll be eating chicken flautas for all meals in the foreseeable future. What an ordeal. But at least the food was really good. If you overlook the hair I found in my rice. (GAG) Oh, speaking of rice, it wasn’t “rice” in the California burrito, it was “fries”. And you know, it was actually really very tasty. I liked it. So yeah, the food was good. But it wasn’t worth an hour of idling in our car next to a busy and seedy bar, and it wasn’t worth paying for so many extra flautas. That we never ordered. Not even close. Plus I got gypped out of my burger. But at least we won’t be saying “we really need to finally try out that place since it’s so close to home…” No, now we’ll be looking the other way when we drive by.