Man Spurned by Island, Seeks Revenge with Fast Food Breakfast

Do you know what this receipt means? Do you know what it represents? Oh, intrepid reader, you would know what it meant if you had spent the Christmas holidays in Freeport. You would know what hunger the food delivered with this receipt soothed, the fact that this cup of coffee was the best I had in a week. You might say that I am bitching about spending a holiday in paradise, and then I would punch you in the face. You deserve it, admit it.

I always assumed that Freeport was founded by pirates or smugglers, or smuggling pirates. I thought the island would have a long history of rum running and sugarcane growing and generally unsavory character, seeing as it is a free port and all. Those seem to attract the worst kind of people. Which makes for the best vacation. Wrong.

Freeport was founded in 1955, by a VIRGINIAN. Which might explain why it is almost as interesting as, oh, say Reston. His name was Wallace Groves. You can see from his picture that he never ran rum even one time in his life.

"That Mamie Eisenhower is one hot broad."

Neither did he ever wear an eyepatch or shiver the timbers. He was a real estate developer who owned all the trees on the island and needed a place for people to live while they cut down the trees, so he could ship them to Florida.

And that is why Grand Bahama Island is one of the most boring islands in the history of islands.

Back to the Burger King receipt. As Christmas was on a Monday, and Boxing Day is a holiday in the Bahamas, basically everything except the resorts closed Saturday night, not to open again for three days. Not even Burger King was open Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. It's a good thing we had bought food from the Winn-Dixie (that is not a typo. There is a freaking Winn-Dixie in Freeport. Toilet paper was $14 for a six pack. Not that I was in the market for toilet paper but it caught my eye). Otherwise we would have starved. Christmas Day we fought with the other thousand tourists on the island for one of the few seats at the only Chinese restaurant. I'd like to apologize to that teenager that I chucked over the railing, but don't cut in front of me when I need Chinese food on Christmas Day.

Golden Toilet Paper? Aisle Six. Next to the Diamond Q-Tips.

So that rainy Boxing Day morning, when we realized that the Burger King down the road had it's lights on, we knew we had received the most important Christmas gift of all: the ability to buy food at normal prices. God bless that craphole of a restaurant that still managed to serve a hot cup of coffee and some sort of sausage patty on a croissant. You truly are doing what Jesus would do. I salute you.

But to you Freeport: you are basically a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, 80 miles to the west. And that's the best and worst thing I could possibly say about you.