By now surely, you’ve seen my article on how the Bass Pro Shop in Springfield Missouri was my idea of Heaven on earth.  The experience was so good that I am following it up with a second part to talk about the great restaurant they have there, Hemingway’s.  It was such a good experience that it deserves its own commitment to sentiment.  But context is needed of course. Hemingway’s was a great restaurant in its own right, and anybody who wants to go out on a Friday night to have a nice dinner would want to just go straight to Bass Pro Shops there in Springfield and eat at Hemingway’s which is a classy sea food place that has all you can eat fish and chips on Friday evenings.  In the world of Covid protocols and having to travel through several blue states that were out of control on mask mandates and much of the south in Texas and Oklahoma that were shut down due to power problems and burst water lines, our visit to Hemingway’s was extraordinarily good, because after many thousands of miles of travel through harsh conditions, it was the first restaurant we were able to stop at where we could sit down and eat and have something of a normal night out together, as we are accustom to as Americans.  After all, we traveled all over New Mexico and only found one restaurant that we were able to sit down and eat at as tourists.  Every other place we had to grab take out and take it back to our RV or eat in the car, which was stupid. Then for the vast sums of miles over a huge portion of the country there just wasn’t power or water.  So, in many ways our stop at Springfield Missouri was a dream come true because I was getting tired of dealing with the effects of stupid liberalism.  It was liberalism that caused much of the trouble in Texas and Oklahoma and it was certainly liberalism that shut down all the restaurants in New Mexico.  Hemingway’s at the Bass Pro Shops in Springfield Missouri was a wonderful oasis that couldn’t have come soon enough, and to say I appreciated it was a vast understatement.

We have come to not appreciate how easy it is to get food these days.  If we want to go out to eat, we do it and can find fulfilment quickly.  But since the government has used Covid-19 to grab power and destroy logic micromanaging all our lives we’ve seen restaurants going down left and right barely staying open as the stupidity of liberal governors has destroyed the markets in their overcontrolling states.  In our case this wasn’t a regional problem, it was experienced over a vast portion of the United States and if we hadn’t had an RV, we wouldn’t have been able to eat regularly while traveling.  Now that would have been fine with the liberal governors because they didn’t want traveling through their state anyway, and they certainly suddenly didn’t care about tourism.  This new woke corporatism that we are experiencing is all about giving up profits to do the right thing from their warped perspective.  That means that service industries are suddenly giving you the middle finger everywhere you go because they don’t want your business.  They are either being put out of business by their government or the government is giving them a subsidy to be closed or operate in a limited capacity.  That said, in the past when you were willing to give your money to a little hole in the wall somewhere, they appreciated it. But not anymore.  The damage done by Covid protocols to tamper with the free market aspect of all businesses has ushered in a really dark period of government control that has ruined the service industry.  So even if you do find a place open, you likely won’t get a very enthusiastic experience.

We are also used to driving a few miles down the road to find something better if you run into a bad experience while on the road.  But for hundreds and hundreds of miles, we found that it was either mask mandates that were ruining the experience, or physical water problems where you couldn’t even use the rest room because they didn’t have any running water.  My wife and I had stopped at the Big Texan down in Amarillo and there we were able to have something of a normal dining experience.  Yet after over a week on the road, we could have counted those experiences with two fingers, and while we were in Amarillo, our campsite was covered with six inches of snow and I was worried the entire meal about ever getting our RV out of its spot so we could continue to travel.  There was a very real possibility that we were going to be stuck there for a few days while the snow melted.  So even though the Big Texan was a wonderful place to stop by and grab a burger, it was hard for me to enjoy knowing some of the challenges I had ahead of us—like being able to leave the next day.  My wife and I even stayed at the Big Texan RV park because it advertised an indoor pool, a limo ride to the Big Texan and a whole bunch of fun service amenities.  But when we arrived the pool was down because it was so cold, all the limos were snowed in, and there was no snow upkeep on the property.  This after 10 hair raising days of bad weather and limited access to services because the New Mexican governor had tight clamps on all economic activity due to Covid.  So literally our next stop after Amarillo was Hemingway’s at Springfield Missouri.

There, things were normal, we arrived late on a Friday night hungry as Hell and ready to relax.  We had driven hard all day for two days and over all that time couldn’t find any place, not even a gas station that was fully operational and not psycho over mask mandates.  Even Texas had mask mandates, so it was pretty ridiculous to deal with.  And the employees at Hemingway’s were wearing masks which disappointed me at first.  But they didn’t let it get in the way of the experience and the atmosphere was so good, and they not only had running water, but they had waterfalls everywhere and a big aquarium behind the bar that we were so grateful for the hint at normalcy.  We took our time eating the all you can eat fish and chips because we literally hadn’t had a good meal for a long time.  A good meal that was worry free.  It was certainly one of those experiences that I will never forget.  I was so appreciative of the good food, the atmosphere, but the audacity of it all.  That Bass Pro in all its capitalist glory had such a great restaurant on their property which could overcome all the nuances of political incompetence which had been so prevalent on our trip was something I wouldn’t soon forget.  And it came in the unlikeliest of places at a time most appreciated. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior
Share, subscribe, and see you later,

Sign up for Second Call Defense at the link below. Use my name to get added benefits.
http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707