Eric, thanks for the update. I was (no, seriously, I WAS) wondering about the proposed location in Midland, on the NW loop. The family and I have stopped in several around the country, and they were also in a location that could be seen - and easily accessed - from the interstate ... so this was something new to us. I had heard, for a long time, that one was coming to the Tall City ..... I has ssumed it would be at somewhere near the I-20/S. Big Spring location.

Jeff, I was remiss in not linking to (or even looking for) the story I heard on this morning's news report. It's here.

The location is in front of Ashley Furniture, confirming the rumor I'd heard for a couple of months.

Eric, I got my tense a little mixed up. I've known about the Ashley Furniture location since the proposal was first announced ..... the rumor of a Cracker Barrel coming to town had been around, like you say, for months before that ..... and THAT is when I was thinking it would be at the southside location .....

As for the northwest ..... might not be a bad idea, when you consider the number of new hotels and residential neighborhoods going up north in that part of the city ..... they might also see increased loop (bypass) traffic if La Entrada ever moves forward.

Oh, I think it will be an excellent location. It's still within spitting distance of I-20, and there's no doubt that that part of town has become restaurant row.

It'll be interesting to see how their damage control process works in this latest development.

Well, they can solve this problem by extending I-27 down from Lubbock to hit Midland at the north loop, which would put Cracker Barrel on the Interstate (though TxDOT seems to have its heart set on running the La Entrada highway on 1788 past the airport). But some of the Cracker Barrels located on toll roads in other states may technically be on Interstates, but the twists and turns you have to take to get there past the toll barriers and side streets make it tougher to reach than someone getting off I-20 at the west loop.

What is a cracker barrel restaurant? What sort of food does it sell?

John, that seems as a good a reason as any to spend a few hundred million dollars. ;-)

Rachel, Cracker Barrel serves hillbilly food. OK, that's unkind. It offers what is known as "country style cooking," or what some of us refer to as comfort food: chicken and dumplings, chicken fried steak, ham and cornbread, fried catfish, etc. Their menu is nothing special, IMO, but their apple dumplings are reason enough to eat there.

Did you say it would be a cut above? Well, that's too bad, because you'll still be over a barrel.

Congratulations! One of the restaurants we've really missed since moving to the northcentral side of the metromess is Cracker Barrel. Tex Mex is great and all, but there are still some foods I miss from periods of my life spent in other parts of the country.

One of these is lunch meat size summer sausage, which is unavailable anywhere south of 100 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. I'm just out of luck, there.

My chances are a bit better, when it comes to country ham and (properly prepared) catfish. Since Cracker Barrel is based in Tennessee and, therefore, not so far from where I spent the formative years 1972-1990, that's about the only place I can go for those, if I want them prepared correctly.

The last time we went to a Cracker Barrel over on the northwest side of the metromess, we commented on our lack of a Cracker Barrel to one of the waiters. He informed us that Cracker Barrel had, in fact, purchased land in Allen but that the projected time frame for its use was unknown. And so we wait.