A few weeks ago, I made a borerline-insane, 38-hour, 2100-mile drive across the country from San Francisco to Minneapolis.  But this post isn’t about the mere 90-minute sleeping stop I made in Wyoming, nor is it about the massive quantities of really horrible truck stop coffee I started consuming around Utah.  No, this is about my quest for more substantial sustinence along the way.  It’s also my way of completely burrying the lede, and a somewhat backwards approach to announcing that I have made said journey.

I generally dislike eating while on road trips, both because of the mess it tends to make in the car and because of the sleepy state it leaves me in.  Not only that, but it’s usually pretty difficult to find appealing food along the way.  What’s not appealing?  Fried, greasy, processed food.  In other words, pretty much everything one would find beside the freeway… except for Subway.

Ah,  Subway.  The bastion of vegetables along the open road.  If a truck stop happens to have a Subway attached to it when I’m hungry, it automatically wins over all neighboring gas stations.  Thanks to good luck, there happen to be a plentiful supply of such stations along most of I-80, so I had some 6″ veggie subs around Nevada and Nebraska.  The price each time? About $2.49, plus perhaps a few cents of tax.  Great.  Fast forward to today.

This afternoon, I was really craving a sandwich, but I was nowhere near home, so I stopped in at Subway for the first time since the drive.  I ordered my usual 6″ veggie sandwich (extra olives, thanks), and was more than a bit surprised to find its price to be $3.00 — about 20% more than it had been.  Making matters worse, the price was the same as many meat-filled options, such as the chicken breast, tuna, turkey, and BLT.  What a rip-off!  An irrational spark of vengence tempted me to order one of the other options — say, the chicken breast — and fling the “free” meat into the trash in front of the employee in some sort of useless protest.

Grrr.  That really irritated me, much more than perhaps it should have.  Maybe it was simply because the same scam is being run on the “$5 footlong” thing — the footlong veggie used to be less than $5, but the price was raised in a sort of subsidy of the meat-filled subs.

What to do?  Well, for the time being, I’m certainly less inclined to patronize Subway.  Now, to find a better on-the-road alternative…