Cuppa Tea, Part 1: The States

The problem with traveling on business is the diabolical illusion that because you're staying in a hotel and eating in restaurants you can have whatever you want.

Say you roll out of bed and what you want is a little something to eat and a quick cup of tea. You open the room service menu and find something simple, and that's where it starts to get complicated.

Yogurt is $5, plus a $2 delivery charge. And an 18% gratuity. Also, for your convenience the receipt will provide a blank space for you to append "Additional Tip," thereby shaming you into appending an additional tip. So now you will be paying around $10 for a cup of yogurt, but, you think, for only $4 more at least you can add tea and feel ready to start your day.

Now, most people think you can get a cup of tea anywhere in the country just like you can get coffee, but this is not the case.

For instance, if you order a cup of tea in a hotel anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line at any time of day it will arrive cold and unsweetened with ice and lemon. According to Andrew Barr's "Drink: A Social History of America," 80% of the tea drunk in America is iced, but virtually all the tea drunk in the South.

So you specify hot tea and they won't usually have it, but if they do it will arrive with a slice of lemon even if you don't ask for it, and if you ask for sugar it will arrive with a packet of Equal.

If you have asked for milk they will bring you a giant glass of milk on the side, as no one in the South can imagine that anyone might want to pour milk into perfectly good tea, especially what with the lemon and all. But you can't tolerate the waste so you cannily specify a little milk for the tea. In this case they will bring you non-dairy creamer. You stand your ground and send that back, insisting on the real thing, and they will return -- I am not kidding -- with a tall glassful of half-and-half and wait with ill-concealed alarm for you to drink it.

At this point you might give up and get in your rental car and drive to that part of the nearest interstate which intersects the edge of town in a long, incandescent string of fast-food franchises followed by two gas stations, a fruit stand and 38 miles of Baptist churches, and find a Dunkin' Donuts and pull up and go in and order a by-God simple cup of tea. And they will smile and say, "Y'all have a good day, now," as they hand you your unsweetened iced tea with lemon.

And so it goes, with variations. On the West Coast it's easier to get crack cocaine than it is to get plain, ordinary, caffeinated, black tea. You can get Earl Grey, if you like the taste of boiled Chanel No. 5, or you can get herbal tea, or tea from fruits, or tea from crushed Chinese wildflowers or powdered South Pacific sea urchins. You can get it with steamed skim and cinnamon sticks and Indian spices and lumps of raw cane and drizzles of soy substitute, but West Coast restaurateurs will join hands and throw themselves into the burning pits of hell before they will give it to you with ordinary milk and plain white sugar, and that is just the way it is.

And as you pick up the phone to order your fifteen-dollar yogurt and cup of hot tea, wherever you are you understand with anticipatory exhaustion that probably you should just have that Fig Newton left over from yesterday. So you hang up and open the minibar to fish out something to wash it down with, and you find it stocked with canned iced tea. With lemon. And Nutrasweet.

The table tent on top of the bar says it is $3.50 plus tax.

And an 18% gratuity.

And you wonder madly for whom, but it doesn't really matter and maybe you don't want to know. The road has its own rules, and thinking you can have what you want just because you're paying for it doesn't mean that that's true.

Like just because you're sleeping in the Bible Belt doesn't mean that Satan isn't living in your minibar.

(To be continued.)