During the last vacation I ever was on in 1999, I couldn’t wait to get the Hell out of that area. We were in severe storms for a week and out riding when tornados came down. Three to four foot diameter pines were dropped all around us, and is a story for another time.
The town was “Jack Bupkus You’ll Regret Staying” with the motto of “If the storms don’t kill you, the people will.”. I looked forward to the first McDonalds a hundred miles away, and I loath McDonalds. It was morning with drenching rains, and we went into a diner for breakfast. Six old men and a lady (I’m being polite using that term.) are the only ones in the place and they’re all watching television. Yes even in that town they had television, they also had all the Christmas lights up around town for the Forth of July weekend. One person in a different restaurant was telling somebody that no one in town had air conditioners, because they’re only needed for a month. Apparently nobody in “Jack Bupkus You’ll Regret Staying” can be bothered to take down the lights, because it snows in a couple more months also.
We get to order in about 15 minutes, and wait 15 minutes for the food (That’s the diners term for it.). We eat, stack the plates and utensils to signal the meal done. We got the woman to get the bill eventually taking her another 15 minutes. She went back in front of the television for 30 more minutes and ignored our requests to pay the bill. She wouldn’t take the money until her show was over. I don’t know why she didn’t hang up the “Sorry Closed” sign for the damn show. Had we not been in “Jack Bupkus You’ll Regret Staying”, I would have left with out paying. I figured we might be in a town with another Ed Gein, or Jeffery Dahmer, so we waited a half hour for the show to end.
This Ed Gein link has a picture of him in a hunting cap and a picture of his house. The pictures are similar to the patrons of this diner and the houses around the town. I would have to compare her to Rosanne Barr in the waitress role. She surpassed Rosanne Barr’s performance and left her in the dust.
This is a small excerpt from a very trying vacation. They still had 5 people missing a couple days later in Duluth, that was hit by the same storms. I never heard of them being found.
A side note: My now dead from Leukemia best freind was from Ed Geins town. I warned people new to work not to bring it up in conversations. It does come up in work situations. They elected to not dig up coffins to find out if the relatives were in them. Wise choice I’d say.
So. Did any of you vacation in “Jack Bupkus You’ll Regret Staying”?