Ponder This

We stopped at a Ponderosa on the way home, in Stroudsberg. At the salad bar, at the Ponderosa, I had an opportunity to ponder many things.

Why is the salad bar so shitty? Why did everyone at the Ponderosa salad bar seem to have an excessive weight problem? How come every time I think about taking some mashed potatoes, a 400 pound person gets in my way? Why was almost every table full with fat families at the Ponderosa? If you could have seen the selection at the salad bar you would understand - fried chicken wings, macaroni and much cheese, pizza, stuffing, gravy, and every fattening thing under the sun that you wouldn't expect in a salad bar. Even the salad and dressings were fattening.

More upsetting were the obese clientele. Just being in there made me want to run to the gym and push people off the treadmill so I could climb on and run for my life. There was a family sitting behind us that couldn't stop laughing, burping and emitting other sounds beyond description.

Surprisingly, my sirloin tips were very yummy. My baked potato was cooked well, very well - a little too well. The skin was completely carbonified. In the middle of my baked potato was a large mound of butter which I removed. I eat butter with complete freedom but that was too much even for me. Jon ordered the seafood platter which was also surprisingly good except for the shrimp which seemed to have completely given its will over to butter. If we needed it, there was melted butter on Jon's plate as well as tartar sauce and a greasy crabcake.
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Leaving the Ponderosa, we got stuck in some traffic on Interstate 80. We still aren't sure what happened. Gradually the traffic slowed down. We noticed police cars on the other side of the divider and then, after about a mile of this, we noticed there were no cars at all moving in the opposite direction. Not one. We crawled for about half an hour, seeing Delaware Water Gap Firemen and NJ State Troopers all along the way and again no oncoming traffic. At the point where our traffic jam opened up, we finally saw where all the cars were stopped like a parking lot. I'm happy we weren't going in that direction because after that it was smooth sailing all the way back to New York.

If anyone knows what happened on Interstate 80 near the Delaware Water Gap, March 13 between 7:45 and 8:30 pm, please let me know. We didn't see anything that looked like an accident or a fire or a shooting or a terrorist attack or a car jacking or etc.