by Kevin Burton
Got an unexpected comfort on the road last week that filled the stomach and the heart.
There isn’t much I don’t like about being on the road. I can see why so many people have written so many love songs to the road and the road life.
I’ve spent most of the last two weeks on the road with my wife Jeannette. Thursday we took off for Chicago and the second of back-to-back weekend beep baseball tournaments with the Cleveland Scrappers.
The unfamiliar route we took had us crossing Missouri not on I-70, but on highway 36 and Missouri 110 in the northern part of the state.
Around 5 p.m. we were running out of gas in the physically tired sense, not in the motor vehicle sense. We felt led by God not to stop at Brookfield, so we sought lodging in Macon, Missouri, a town we had never heard of, at the Comfort Inn. We called from the car as we passed through Chillicothe, a little more than an hour from Macon.
The second shift manager Rebecca answered the phone when we asked about a room.
“Sorry, I was in the kitchen. I’m walking back to the desk now,” Rebecca said.
I briefly wondered why the manager would be in the kitchen but dismissed it from mind, being on task to find a room for the night.
The room was more affordable than the Hilton brand hotels we had been staying at. I certainly filed that away.
After we reached our Thursday destination, Rebecca told us about the room, breakfast hours, checkout time, the usual stuff, then she said, “And we have chicken and noodles in the dining room.”
Chicken and noodles? Did I hear that right? Now that was news we could use! Who has chicken and noodles for hotel guests at six at night?
So we went upstairs, put away our belongings and hurried back downstairs to investigate.
There were two other couples in the dining area. There was chicken and noodles in two crock pots on the counter on the left side of the room, and there was also a big bowl of salad. A few feet away, two barrels were filled with beverages on ice.
Not sure if God shielded us from something harmful at Brookfield or if He had this special blessing in mind for us at Macon. What a blessing either way. But the proof was in the pudding, or rather, in the chicken and noodles.
“This is good. This is really good,” we both said after tasting the dinner. The chicken and noodles instantly shot to the top of my hotel-food experiences. This was owing both to the high quality of the present meal and to the low quality of the usual hotel fare, which resides somewhere in the food family, like maybe a third or fourth cousin, but isn’t really food you would serve to anybody you liked.
My rule for professional cooks/restaurants is to be legit, you have to at least beat my C-plus level cooking. This to me was an A-plus. The chicken was shredded perfectly, making each bite equally pleasant. There was also something about the meal that brought out the chicken flavor. It was something I couldn’t identify.
Somehow I stopped myself from a second helping, deferring to other guests who might stop by. Full disclosure: the first helping was robust enough.
I was at once very pleasantly amazed at this dinner surprise, and chagrinned that maybe 25 minutes earlier as we gassed up, to save us from going out again, I had bought one of those death-warmed-over pizza slices of uncertain age and ancestry. You know, the kind sitting forlornly under a lamp in a cabinet/cage all day, in a box that never closes correctly.
How was I to know Rebecca had taken care of us.
So here is where you will be disappointed in me, I didn’t go to the front desk to ask Rebecca what gives, how and why she convinced upper management to allow her to go the extra mile for weary customers who may have eaten one too many chain restaurant burgers.
I was tired, what can I say, and didn’t immediately put two and two together, the “sorry I was in the kitchen” part, and the “we have chicken and noodles.”
I imagine her as a culinary school student, working at the hotel to pay for school. But whatever the story, here’s a shoutout to Rebecca in Macon, Missouri.
We thought about going back to Macon on the way home, but we were so tired from the Sunday game in the cold Chicago rain (final score Cleveland 9, Minnesota 6. Woo-hoo!) that we only made it as far as Hannibal.
We did stay at another Comfort Inn there though. We had choices at Hannibal, and picked Comfort Inn because of how we were treated at Macon.
Not going to lie, I was thinking we might get another great dinner there. We got the same lower price but no chicken and noodles. The A-plus dinner at Macon probably had everything to do with Rebecca, the manager, not the chain.
Hotel stays are mostly uneventful. Only an especially good or bad experience will cause you to remember it even six months later. This one will stay in my mind for a while.
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