Walcott, Iowa. 1979.
Rumbling down I-80 with 18 wheels beneath me.
New to the “trucking game” and it was time to eat. Unsure where to eat; knowing that the presence of the BIG rigs often only meant there was room to park, not that it was a place with good or even merely edible food.
The truck stop was small, an older place, nothing special in appearance.
Inside, the local gals, several rather elderly, were kind and pleasant and recommended the fried chicken dinner.
The meal arrived in stages.
A decent salad with several ingredients; not just droopy lettuce with glop atop. A good salad.
Then the main meal arrived accompanied by a small loaf of warm bread baked on location.
BIG hunks of chicken with a lotta’ meat on each piece. Tasty and thinly breaded with yummy non-greasy breading that assisted making that meal one of, if not the single best, fried chicken meals this now semi-elderly Disgruntled Old Coot has ever dug into!!!
The large pile of real mashed taters was slathered with a thicker white gravy with chunks of some type of meat within the gravy. It complimented the fried chicken, not competing with it.
The green beans were also quite good with added spices I could not identify making them tastier. I did detect some added butted melted into the beans that were not soggy as so many typical canned green beans are.
And that bread… so yummy and the whipped easily-spread butter made it even better.
I had a more-then ample appetite “in the day” yet that wonderful meal filled me to the tippy-top and I savored every delicious bite.
I complimented the waitress and asked her to convey my thanks to the chef and crew; who were all local rural Iowa folks I was told.
It was farm country and I could envision the delights awaiting locals when after a day of shucking corn and plowing the lower 400 acres returning home to their awaiting meal.
The truck stop still exists but I left trucking years ago and the Web tells me that small older truck stop has grown, expanded, and rightly so if they continued serving food of the quality I had upon that visit!!!
Imagine, a decades-past fried chicken dinner still prominent within my memory.
Sadly, a trucker’s schedule, tight delivery times and other reasons, especially long-haul truckers, required that I, several times, keep the “hammer down” and drive past the source of the meal that made me quiver with delight and desire.
Departing long-haul trucking I returned to California and I never had the opportunity nor discretionary wealth to trek so far for just a meal but I did have a few opportunities during those long-ago trucking days to visit the home of the finest chicken dinner ever.
I Adore Food 