Batesville: Great fabric store, horrible restaurant

We took the Subaru to Batesville on Saturday to check out a fabric store.

Maria met a woman at Hancock's in Paducah, Ky. last month who claimed that Marshall's Dry Goods in Batesville had Hancock's beat.

Turns out she was right. Maria got some killer deals on fabric - deals so good that her purchases included two bolts of fabric, a quantity she's never bought before.

We got there a little after noon and decided, after Maria had done a quick survey or the place, that she should have lunch and come back for some serious shopping.

So we did something that nearly always produces a bad result: we asked the locals to recommend a good restaurant.

Since we've been in Arkansas, we've hated nearly every restaurant recommended by an Arkansan. And it happened again on Saturday.

Everybody in the joint pointed us to Kelly's Wyatt Restaurant and recommended the buffet.

So we laid a course to the restaurant into the Garmin GPS and were there in less than 10 minutes.

The buffet was pretty limited - fried chicken, liver and onions (the smell almost made Maria gag), mashed potatoes and chicken gravy, carrots, spaghetti with a sauce that looked like someone combined meat loaf and tomatoes in a blender, woody spinach, and watery peach cobbler.

And everything we chose was tepid, flat and tasteless. It was, without question, the most insipid food I've had since leaving Indiana.

Back at Marshall's, Maria plunged into her quilter's fabric frenzy and I settled down with my iPod in the car. Presently, I noticed one of the cars parked in front of the store had an Indiana license plate. On closer scrutiny, I saw it was from Tipton County. I started my newspaper career 43 years ago at the Tipton Daily Tribune.

I moved the car to a space next to the Hoosier car and waited. A few minutes later, the driver came out. His wife and sister-in-law were shopping and, like me, he got tired of standing around.

He was born in Arkansas but raised in Kokomo where he worked at the Chrysler transmission plant and was president of the UAW local for a few years before he retired. He now lives near Sharpsville where he was town marshal for a spell. He and his wife were vacationing in Arkansas for a few days and he was doing genealogical research on his family tree.

We spent about a half-hour exploring mutual connections and contrasting Arkansas with Indiana until his wife and sister-in-law came out.

It was nice to talk with a fellow Hoosier. I didn't realize how starved I was for a little shot of Indiana culture.