Going with Grandpa

When I was a little girl I loved to go with my dad and my grandpa to do things on the ranch.  I especially loved going to the mountains and the best trips were when we had to take horses to work cows or fix fence or whatever needed to be done horseback.  I was extremely partial to going with grandpa because grandpa was fun and mostly because he spoiled the shit out of me!

It was guaranteed that if I went with my grandpa we would be stopping for a treat.  When I was really small grandpa would take me to the Valley Cafe in my hometown.  If it was winter time and I had gone with him to feed cows, he would take me up to the cafe for hot chocolate.  I didn’t so much love the hot chocolate but I did love the whipped cream that came on top.  It was the real thing, creamy and rich, piled high on top of the steaming liquid.  Once I got all of the whipped cream finished, I was pretty much done with my mug of cocoa.  Other times when we would go to the cafe grandpa would get me french fries.  They were the real deal; real potatoes, hand-cut and fried golden and crispy with lots of ketchup and/or fry sauce.  REAL fry sauce, you know the light pink, tangy goodness indigenous to Southern Idaho and Utah!  NOT tartar sauce which was what I used to get served when I moved to the state of Washington.  Many restaurants here have seen the light however and serve real fry sauce but I digress.

                           Fry sauce                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         NOT fry sauce

After the Valley Cafe burned down, my grandpa would take me to Durfee’s Cafe which was a truck stop out by the freeway (and my future place of employment as a teenager).  We would get root beer floats or an ice cream cone or maybe pie and there would always be some locals up there for grandpa to shoot the breeze with.  Sometimes I think we went there less for treating me and more for grandpa to go B.S. with all of his friends!

If grandpa needed to go to town, to take a cow to the vet, pick up farm supplies or get some sort of farm equipment fixed, that was the best because he would almost always take me to Pizza Hut.  We would always get the same thing, personal pan pizza and root beer.  Of course all of the employees at Pizza Hut knew my grandpa.  In fact, there were very few place he went that he didn’t find at least one person he knew and that was the boring part for a kid; the hours of visiting!  Waiting for grown-ups to visit was like dying a slow death but in the end I think the treats out-weighed the waiting and I never turned down a trip with grandpa!