My Trip to the Waffle House

Over April break my mom and I travelled 1,116.6 miles to Folly Beach, South Carolina. The trip there was smooth, no issues with connecting flights or passengers on the plane, it was smooth sailing. But unfortunately the whole trip was not this way…

We arrived at the beach house where the rest of my family was staying. That night we had the rehearsal dinner for the wedding that we were originally in South Carolina to attend. There was a food truck and mingling, overall this was a pretty good night as well. Next day rolls around, the wedding day. We had to go to the beach early in the morning to set up the chairs and decorate the tables. The layout looked beautiful, but there was one issue. The wind was blowing probably 100 mph (very exaggerated, but it felt this way). Things were falling and breaking and it was cold. We did not escape the cold in Maine by heading South because it was almost just as cold, if not colder. But the ceremony was beautiful (except for the sand blowing on our faces and into our eyes). Overall we had another good day, the trip was going well…until our visit to the Waffle House.

The Waffle House is ultimately a southern IHOP. My mother has been obsessed with this restaurant forever, ever since her first visit. Every time we travel to South Carolina she begs and pleads that everyone goes to this breakfast style restaurant. She even goes as far to take a mug almost every time she goes. But this visit was different…

We drive into a town called St.Thomas where we see graffiti on a building saying the words, “Town of Friendly People”, my family laughed as we saw this and said “This is the kind of town we want to be in!” We find the nearest Waffle House and we walk inside…we soon realized that the people working here were not going to be friendly. As soon as we sat down, the waitress kept eyeing us but never came over to take our order. We did not want to seem rude by asking the woman to come over to take our order but we were soon getting to that point since we had waited about 15 minutes for someone to even take our drink order.As soon as she walked over we told her what we wanted to drink and I asked, “Do you guys have chocolate milk?”, since I had not seen it on the menu. She quickly responded with “Yes?” and rolled her eyes. I was shocked but went about with ordering. When she came back with our drinks and to take our breakfast order, my family knew we were going to have a memorable trip to the Waffle House, but not in a good way. We ordered quickly and simply, not asking many questions so that we did not get an eye roll from our waitress. My grandmother wanted more coffee during her meal but was scared to ask because she did not want to get yelled at. At the end of our meal, the waitress walked over and said, “Here’s your waffle you ordered”, we all looked at each other puzzled, everyone at the table who had ordered a waffle had got theirs. I was too scared to say we didn’t order another waffle so I quickly took it and ate a few bites.

When it came time to pay, my mother was way too nervous to ask if they charged us for an extra waffle so she quickly paid so we could scoot out of there. In the end, I guess I (maybe) got a free waffle from this traumatic visit to the Waffle House.

Photo Credit: Photo by Thomas Hawk on Foter.com / CC BY-NC