Road Trip!
Sometimes a little shared madness is all you need to feel like you belong in this world. It was a Sunday and as is my wont I had a little case of the Sunday sads. Born from being bored and lazy and grief stricken that another full working week lay ahead, I was languishing on the sofa watching A play Far Cry 2, when K came online. Immediately both A and I messaged her, complaining of boredom and other ailments. After sharing our various news it was decided that rather than be bored and despairing alone we should endeavour to meet to languish on someone’s sofa, somewhere, together.
In the disjointed to and fro that is messaging I suggested (as a joke) that it was the perfect time to indulge our long held ambition to invade the pastoral idyll of Bendigo and avail ourselves of one of the last remaining Pizza Hut ‘all you can eat’ smorgasboards in the state. This was a road trip often mused over but not undertaken. In fact K and L had been hatching plans for it for quite a while before we muscled in on the territory. Recognising that we shared a special brand of insanity between us, K & L had floated the notion some weeks back. Much mirth was had planning the trip and reminiscing about the gastronomic apocalypse that the ‘all you can eat’ smorgasboard represented to us in our fondly remembered childhoods.
Thus a truly ill advised and completely wonderful plan was born. K & L would pick us up and we would embark upon a spontaneous road trip down the Hume to the gold rush town of Bendigo, whereupon we would relieve the locals of all their pizza and their soft serve icecream with sprinkles.
The open road is a wonderful thing. There is nothing like a road trip to break you out of fug. For one thing its a change of scenery, a brief respite from the well-trodden route from home to work and back again. The drive down the Hume is flat and the scenery, while nicely diverting on a boring Sunday afternoon, is not particularly spectacular. It takes at least 45 mins to clear the outer suburbs of Melbourne and start to see fields. This did not matter though as were were all content to chat and let the kilometers tick over. A & L are particularly well suited for a lengthy jaw session as they have some hobbies in common and seem to appreciate each others point of view on most topics K drove and I rode shotgun, chatting away and having a little giggle at A & L who, charmingly, were being total fanboys in the back seat. It was a pleasant, soothing trip, and brought home to me how similar we all were, as couples and as individuals. Its rather nice to be able to blather on in using your own lexicon and have someone basically understand you.
The drive took about 1hr 45min. The outskirts of Bendigo are typical small town stuff - not quite a built up and manky as the outskirts of Geelong - but with the same overall feel. Pizza Hut is on the edge of the town, but to get there we passed 2 Hungry Jacks, a KFC and a McDonalds as well as numerous shops and average looking houses…all standard fare. It was almost like we had travelled over an hour and a half past fields and cows and had somehow found more outer Melbourne suburbs. It felt distinctly Melton-esque. Feeling like kids we were excited to hear the GPS announce our imminent arrival.
Upon turning into the street where Pizza Hut was located I was delighted to see a true country cliche parked in the angle parking alongside our cheesy pizza mecca. A white ute all kitted out with roo spotters, bull bar, mudflaps with the silhouettes of naked women and 5 foot tall CB radio antennas with a behatted, skinny-jean wearing proto bogan in the front seat awaited us. Priceless. Our arrival time, 6pm, heralded the start of the dinner rush for Bendigo’s Pizza Hut’s. The small restaurant had a number of tables occupied already, and after a painfully slow payment process, we were ensconced in the first booth by the door, directly opposite the all you can eat bain-marie.
The dining room had obviously seen better days. In fact the whole Pizza Hut chain has seen better days really. It must be hard to compete in the pizza business where just about any corner pizza parlour is capable of producing better fare than what Pizza Hut can turn out in its production line kitchen at the hands of its 15 year old employees. However, we weren’t there for the decor. Nor were we there for the pizza really. We were there for The Works, that crappy, over salty, chemically laden, trough-dining experience complete with sneeze guard - and happily Bendigo’s Pizza Hut delivered beautifully.
In terms of people watching we were blessed with many categories of strange and scary to choose from. There was a table of people who seemed to only like to eat the first bite of any slice of pizza before discarding the remainder of the slice into a pile on the middle of their table. The amount of half chewed food they were leaving behind was amazing. They reminded me of wasps, except they were making their next from the leavings of pizza rather than chewed wood or paper. Then there was an enormously pregnant teenage girl, who on each foray to the pizza bain-marie managed to display a staggering amount of unattractive side boob. She was lank haired, slouchy and vaguely unwashed looking. It made my eyes burn.
The first thing we discovered was that sitting in a booth limited the ability of everyone to gain access to the food. Rookie mistake! The arrival of fresh pizza (well fresh anything really) triggered a rush on the bain-marie. With approx 8 slices per pizza there was much jousting for fresh fodder and it was surprising that there was no West Side Story style face off with pizza servers amongst the diners. The pizza’s consisted of a lot of melted cheese and not much else. Anything saucy (except tomato paste) was also well represented. Completely under represented were toppings like pepperoni, pineapple and anything vaguely resembling a vegetable. Strangely they were heavy on those tiny little meatball things which are nothing more than mechanically recovered nuggets of lips and tail. Bleh!
After 3 slices of pizza which all seemed to taste the same, I started to look for alternative combinations of food. The little salty discs of garlic bread were greatly improved by a scoop of the bolognese sauce and a dusting of parmesan cheese from the ’salad bar’. Said salad bar was a tiered arrangement of sad foodstuffs which had seen better days. There was pasta salad, coleslaw and potato salad all swimming in a bath of cheap mayonnaise and sad pots of other vegetables. Everthing that by genetics should have been brightly coloured and fresh looking was dispirited and grey tinged. You don’t eat ‘The Works’ for the sad vegetables though. A demonstrated this by ignoring the salad bar altogether and inventing the bolognese pizza sandwich - 2 slices of pizza with a scoop of bolognese sauce in the middle. Frightful but hilarious.
After 2 big glasses of soft drink and a couple of rounds of pizza jousting with the natives it was time to turn our attention to the dessert bar. Pizza Hut’s chocolate mouse is some kind of powdered chocolate evil. It looks like it should taste good, it looks like regular mousse, but in fact it is a gluey, tasteless glop. The jewel in Pizza Hut’s all you can eat crown has to be the soft serve ice cream with sprinkles. Awesome! You get to serve yourself as much as you can pile into the tiny plastic bowl and you can liberally douse the lot with as many multi-coloured sprinked as you like. If it had not been for the massive group of 14 year olds that invaded the restaurant and managed to break the ice cream machine, I would have had 2 servings.
Then like a fairy tale, the meal was over and the eaters remorse kicked in - right around the time the massive insulin dose hit and everyone felt like taking a nap. The drive home was delerious, with many complaints of growing food babies and diabeties. L drove and A rode shotgun (more fan boy geekery) while K and I relaxed in the back seat rubbing our bellies. It was a great, silly adventure and a wonderful antidote for the Sunday sads.
