Breakfast Included - by Christopher

I don't think I've traveled around the USA enough to know if breakfast is typically included in the cost of a hotel room or not.

Also, the times I have traveled around the US, I've probably slept through most of the 'free breakfast' windows of opportunity.

If you write and tell me that I have been sleeping through free breakfast in America, my next thing would be to wonder if I've been missing the kind of great quality breakfasts that Sarah won't let me sleep through over here.

The selection is basically the same stuff everywhere; some bread, various jams, jellies and chocolate peanut butter spread (my favorite), some hard-boiled eggs, some delicious fresh tomato slices, maybe a little fruit sometimes, maybe a little cereal sometimes, stinky cheese and limp cold cuts (I never touch these).

My favorite part beside the chocolate peanut butter spread is the hard-boiled egg. I usually have at least two every morning, sometimes three if I'm feeling like I really need the protein that day. Some places even have the little "hard-boiled egg holder plate" (I don't know what to call it). I really like this thing because it is built with its own hard-boiled egg compartment. You just place the egg in the little compartment and it makes it so much easier to peel the shell off.

My method of eating a hard-boiled egg really annoys Sarah. Sarah eats her meals at least twice as fast as I do. So her method of eating a hard-boiled egg is to cut the whole thing in half with her butter knife and then spoon it out of the shell. My method is to meticulously peel off each and every little fragment of shell, and to pop the whole egg in my mouth.

When I have tried to use Sarah's method, I usually end up getting little bits of shell in my mouth. I cannot stand this for some reason. She has assured me several times that there's nothing wrong with eating a little bit of the shell. But I just keep thinking, "I can't eat the shell, it's bad." I wonder if my parents remember any episode from my childhood that might explain this irrational aversion to eating even the tiniest piece of eggshell.

Some mornings I still have trouble getting up for the free breakfast, even though I am completely in love with the free breakfast. I have to lay there and imagine the feeling of satisfaction I'll have when I peel off that last little bit of shell - the egg naked and unblemished in my palm - and the wonderful glop glop glop of chewing the whole egg up in one big mouthful. This helps me to throw the covers off and get dressed. Then I am really ready for my free breakfast, man.

But sometimes I wake up and I'm lying in bed and it's dark out. I look at the clock and it's maybe 2 in the morning. And the dream I just had was so realistic that I lie in bed for the next thirty minutes with my stomach rumbling, thinking that all I want to do right then is eat a hard-boiled egg. Then I feel unsettled, because I don't have a hard-boiled egg to eat. Because I'm laying in my hotel bed in the middle of the night.

So I end up laying there in the quiet darkness, wondering if there are free breakfasts in the USA. And I wonder if I've slept through dozens and dozens of free breakfast opportunities in my travels through the states.

And then, later, I spin the whole thing out into a 600 word blog post.