Competing Desires

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Along our trip to Origins and back is Sweetwater Barbecue. SVC and I both consider the barbecue there to be very good. We always look forward to stopping there for lunch on the way to Origins. We always consider stopping there on our way back.

The problem is that however much we like the barbecue there, we also just want to get home, and the drive to get home makes us move further than we used to.

Originally, we would stop at Effingham, Illinois, on our way home. We usually got there about 2100 hrs, and would bed down. Come the morning we new we could not leave Effingham until after 0800 hrs, because if we left earlier we would hit St. Louis in the middle of the morning rush hour. Staying until 0800 meant we would hit St Louis at 1000 hrs, when most people would be at work and we could slip through. We would thus hit Sweetwater about lunch time and be able to stop.

But we always wound up wasting time sitting around in Effingham either not able to sleep yet, or having woken up early because we were still on the Origins schedule and not able to leave yet or we would be caught in the rush hour traffic.

We want to get home.

So one year we decided to try pushing on to St Clair. This gets us through St. Louis about 2300 hrs, when most people have gone to bed because the next day is a normal work day.

The result is that every year we tell ourselves we will sleep in at St. Clair so we can have Sweetwater Barbecue, but every year we wake up on "Origins time", and cannot sit around waiting because we want to get home.

So, every year (but the last year) since we adopted the St. Clair pattern, we pass Sweetwater Barbecue about an hour before they open. We talk about waiting for it to open, but neither of us can stand the idea of losing another hour on the trip home.

The desire to get home has always trumped the desire to have some of that really good Sweetwater Barbecue.

The only reason we got to have it on the trip home last year was that we decided to stop at Fort Leonard Wood to visit the museum (WHICH WAS CLOSED FOR RENOVATION). We lost so much time going through security and finding the museums (why security could not tell us the museums were closed we have never figured out) that Sweetwater Barbecue was going to be open. It was worth it to back track the five or so miles from Leonard Wood to exit #163 to eat there (we think the Barbecue is that good). It is just not good enough to wait more than 15 minutes (we have discussed this, and it is the maximum amount of time either of us is willing to wait) for it to open.