USA ’22 – Day 10 – Bonus Entry!

What’s more American than a night out listening to country and western music and eating a plate full of barbecue food? Not a lot and so tonight, in true American style, we drove the two minutes from our replacement hotel to Ebenezer’s Barn and Grill across the road to sample some of both.

I’d booked this on a whim back in the UK when we were planning the holiday and really had little idea about what it would be like. I did know that we would be sat reasonably close to the front on a table of eight people. This meant that there would be six people joining us and we would have no idea who we might get and worse still we’d probably have to talk to them!

The evening was sold out and packed with about 200 plus holiday makers including, it turned out, a large contingent of French. The six on our table weren’t French but three American couples who were all friends and holidaying together.

They were engaging and all keen to talk about what we were doing, where we were from etc. They said that they were sorry about the Queen, did we think Charles was going to be any good as King and what did we think of the new PM? We asked them about their views on Biden and they were surprisingly split 50:50.

They were staying here in Bryce in their RVs for about a week before returning home. As we recounted the intenary that we are on and the punishing schedule that we have set ourselves – today Zion and Bryce, Wednesday the Grand Canyon etc it reminded me of the joke that we tell about the Americans travelling in Europe – “If it’s Tuesday it must be Italy” and I thought how unfair that really was when we are guilty of exactly the same thing. We encouraged them to come to the UK as they’d currently get great value given the weak pound!

After our meal, which was pretty good, came the main event – a country and western band called the Bryce Canyon Wranglers who then proceeded to spend an hour bashing out what we assumed were hits or “bangers” to use the current parlance. I can’t really verify whether they were or not as I only recognised two songs and can name only one of those two – Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler but they were good and tuneful.

All in all it was a very enjoyable evening made more so by the pleasant company.