Our Worst Coffee Day Texas to Florida

Our Worst Coffee Day during our round-trip-coffee-florida-to-texas.

20-20 Hindsight

Our whirlwind Texas visit had been full of joy and surprises but entirely too fast.

We got a shaky start leaving Dallas to head back to Florida. Trying to beat the morning commute traffic out of town – with a combination of massive road construction and a total lack of familiarity with the Dallas landscape – proved to be a bad idea.

Leaving town that morning, we could not find an espresso shop between the hotel and the freeway. We figured they’d be all over the place. They weren’t.

There was time to relax and enjoy the morning before we took off. A few blocks from the hotel was an espresso cafe we liked. We easily could have walked there before we checked out, but we didn’t.

We had decided – instead – to get a jump on the return trip to Florida by leaving early. Unfortunately, after I missed a couple exits forcing re-routes, there was no jump. It was kind of like dancing with a bad ankle, or a missing heel on one shoe, where the more you try to compensate, the more you stumble. In this case, I didn’t have a sore ankle and both of my shoes had heels on them.

My wife is a traveler and explorer. She is also a very kind, loving and tolerant person. When my driving doesn’t match her level of traveling expertise (which is exceptional), she gets frustrated with me because she always sees a simple solution. Me – not so much. My driving that morning was a textbook version of that scenario. As a result, a ‘poor-launch-tension’ permeated the cab of our S.U.V., kind of like a pounding headache.

This morphed our mutual longing for a good cup into a necessity.

Twenty twenty hindsight, right?

So that was the beginning of our worst coffee day of the trip.

BUCC-EE’S

About an hour out, we ended stopping for coffee at BUC-EE’s and a gas tank topper.

As far as road trip coffee goes – in the C-Store world – BUC-EE’S offers up abundant, fresh, hot coffee and excellent service. BUC-EE’S is kind of like the Disney World of C-Stores. You don’t just stop for gas, it’s more like a family outing to the county fair. The place is amazing and they put on a good show. At the locations, we have visited they have great staff – and clearly – excellent management. We love BUC-EE’S.

Even though it wasn’t our first choice, BUC-EE’S coffee was decent launch fuel. And as it turned out, it ended up being the best coffee we had the entire day.

Burn Out

Driving was a struggle that day. Probably just because we jammed a lot into 10 days of travel and we were hitting a saturation point. Normally we can push pretty hard when we need to, but we were both fatigued and I was experiencing a long-distance-dread. The kind where you know you have another 10 hours ahead of you and you’d rather be home already, sleeping.

Anyway, that makes a long day seem way longer and our bad-coffee-start magnified that feeling.

For us, a good cup of coffee, or espresso (preferably), is the way we start things and it usually sets the tempo for the day; usually good or better. This morning start not only didn’t set a travel tempo – the rhythm was off too. We were out of sync.

In retrospect, it just occurred to me more accurately, “I” was out of sync. It wasn’t “we”. Just the same, it un-synced “us”.

I just realized that when “we’re” out of sync, it’s usually because I un-sync us. Sorry, honey for un-syncing you.

P.J.’s Coffee in Ruston, Louisiana

It seemed like a really long time to get from Dallas to PJ’s Coffee in Ruston, Louisiana. Looking it up on Google, it’s only 254 miles, a 3 hour and 45 min drive. Seemed more like 6. My travel expert and navigator was reading coffee reviews online while I drove, searching ahead for espresso prior to Ruston. She found several but we decided to give PJ’s a try.

The reviews for PJ’s were good, and while my-inner-child kept whining in my head: “Are we there yet?”, my outer self started getting excited about a good cup of Joe.

Great Venue

The venue was an espresso operator’s dream. Close to the freeway exit. Easy access and plenty of room for drive through traffic. It still had the feeling of recent construction. What a cool set up, I thought, as we approached.

Whoever designed that store floor plan and the drive-through layout knew exactly what they were doing. It was designed for high volume, efficient espresso delivery. I loved the layout – we both did. It was clean, bright and appealing. We both anticipated a needed reset for the day.

The colors, the windows, the coffee preparation area, the building, the footprint, equipment: A1. Big thumbs up.

It all screamed: DRINK MY COFFEE.

Ah Yes, The Coffee…

At this point I just wanted to sit down with my lovely wife, savor some really good coffee, relax  and get the road kinks out.

The staff was composed of college kids who liked working at an espresso shop. My initial impression was that they were going through the motions of espresso preparation and moving about as though they hoped we would think they knew what they were doing. Intuition told me this was the case.but my lizard brain told me to ignore that intuition and drink some coffee.

After a bathroom break and looking all around the store – oohing and awing at the details – we ordered espresso and a pastry (can’t remember which).

We threw it out…

The coffee was hideous.

Even after waiting about half a day for an espresso, we quietly tossed it in the garbage on the way out the door. This is a common event for us.  Experience shows that it doesn’t do any good to complain because if they remake it, it’s still bad. It’s just simpler to go somewhere else and get a good cup.

This was particularly bad coffee.

It didn’t make sense…

I thought:

• How could anybody willing to design and build such a beautiful venue serve coffee this bad ? Something doesn’t add up.
• It might be a franchise and the franchisee has never owned an espresso cafe before. (This was pure speculation on my part.)
• The staff needs way better training program, p.d.q.
• Maybe they have a water problem: bad water = bad coffee. Dirty espresso machine. Wrong extraction timing. Or all three.

In all fairness…

In all fairness, I would like to try it again. If I ever get back that way again, I will. I’m not drawing a conclusion on the P.J.’s brand – or this location – based on a single experience.

But, I’m not driving 11 hours and 26 minutes just to find out. Next time we go to Texas we will.

9/22 Update and Sidebar:

As I thought about it further, it occurred to me that the time we went through there (11/21), we were just coming out of covid lockdown and times had been tough for coffee operators.

With some research, I found an article about a new PJ’s franchise opening in Ruston in August 2020. So we really have to cut these guys some slack. New operators + covid financial pressure. It must have been a challenging time to open. The owners seem like nice people and we wish them the best. Thank you for your service Bobby Mounts !!

There’s More – The Day’s Not Over Yet…

Remember the title of this post is: Our Worst Coffee Day – Not The Worst Coffee…

To add insult to injury, we went to two more coffee shops in Ruston.

Railway Coffee

As we approached Railway Coffee and found a parking space, and walked towards the shop, we thought: finally espresso – Yay !!!

It was a comfortable shop – like a well worn big leather chair. There was a sense that they had been doing coffee for some time and that it was reasonable to assume we were about to experience a great cup of coffee.

As we entered we ignored the handwritten sign – taped to the front window, flapping in the breeze – that said: NO COFFEE TODAY and went inside to the counter to order.

“We have baked goods but NO COFFEE TODAY.”

Railway Coffee was open but they weren’t serving coffee. For some reason, they had no water that day.

WHAT ??? Are you kidding me? This isn’t really happening, is it?

Well, yes it is.

So back to the car, and try this again.

My lovely-navigator-search-expert found us another shop a few blocks away. We parked in the lot near the store and went in, not sure what to expect anymore that day.

The Depot Coffee House

As we walked in to the shop, we were worn out.

There was something odd about The Depot Coffee House. The shop had a nice service area and counter design.

It took a while to get service – almost as if there was something more important going on than coffee or a customer. Staff was cordial but not warm and fuzzy. Yet there were no other customers that I can remember. It felt like:

What are you doing here?

I got the feeling that the coffee was going to be stale – from looking at the oil and color of the beans in the grinder hopper.

And it was. I wondered to myself: how long have those beens been sitting there?

We didn’t stay long.

And again, we threw out the coffee when we left. The coffee was flat – kind of old and tired.

At this point it was not even disappointment anymore, more like disbelief.

We Left Ruston Unrefreshed.

We decided that food was in order and we wandered around looking for something appealing to eat. I don’t remember what we ate only that it was not remarkable. We ended up leaving Ruston about an hour and a half after we got there, unrefreshed.

We decided to make tracks and get gone. My navigator took over and put some distance between us and Ruston.

Rough Day

By the time we landed that night, we were exhausted. I can’t remember what town we slept in that night and when I referenced the credit card bill to find out, it only said “Travelocity” not the location where we used the card.

Exhausted, we grabbed some food at a local Walmart – including some Perrier, fresh cream and some Newman’s Own Organic coffee pods for the next morning. At this point, we had run out of Beaniac Organic Pods in Dallas.

We stayed in a motel that was being renovated – sort of. We got what was probably the last room. The shower was not very clean and the toilet clogged on us. We felt like we didn’t really want to touch anything – much less sleep there. But fatigue prevailed and we did.

Some Days Aren’t Coffee Friendly.

This was one of them and one for the bad-coffee-day-record-book. Looking back it feels like a sitcom episode, but it didn’t at the time.

We wrote it off; chose to move on and leave that day behind. The next morning, we started  using our Keurig before we left the motel and got to enjoy phenomenal espresso at the Lucky Goat in Tallahassee that afternoon.

That day we made it home.