Dairy Queen is King

They reopened the Dairy Queen near where I work. When I read about the reopening in the newspaper, I was admittedly really excited.

I was pumped last week to be able to go grab a DQ burger for lunch. This same restaurant shut down a little over a year ago. Around that same time, the other two DQs in our general vicinity closed also. I was livid.

DQ is tops on my fast-food burger list, followed by Wendy's, and then probably Steak and Shake. All the others are pretty much tied for nasty.

So a coworker and I went and grabbed some DQ that day last week when I found out about its reopening. He and I wolfed down our burgers. Then it was ice cream time -- we were literally like 4-year olds in a candy store. Peanut buster parfait, oh yeah - that thing has my name on it. So good....

The thing that is so awesome about DQ is the soft serve ice cream. My wife thinks traditional ice cream is the best. So we really don't see eye to eye on ice cream preference. I love soft serve ice cream. McDonald's is alright in a pinch. But Dairy Queen is King.

Plus I have an affinity for DQ (well, soft serve ice cream as a whole) that goes back to probably when I was four - maybe earlier. An acquaintance of my dad's from long ago, in the age before the Atari, ran a DQ in their hometown. The cool thing about his franchise location was that he had an Apollo command module parked out front. I used to love going to get an ice cream cone and check out the CM. Of course, we had another favorite ice-cream stand along the main highway running through town that had soft-serve. One of my favorite things about road-tripping during the spring and summer was stopping there. That ice cream stand has long since disappeared, but the memory of it remains.

Fast-forward to today... as I'm leaving work, it was just hot. Sweltering. Something had to be done. As I'm about to pull out of our main parking lot at work and go straight to the road across, something told me to turn left instead and take my secondary route home. I wasn't quite sure what caused me to do that.

So to the left I went. Was going down the road, and then I came up to the turn to the DQ. It was then that I knew why I made that left turn -- it's ice cream time, baby.

Three minutes later I was going down the road with a vanilla ice cream cone in my hand. DQ soft serve ice cream -- so good.