Because we were being spontaneous we were kind of hosed by the movie times. We had to leave ‘now’ and find somewhere we could eat ‘fast’ to get to the 7:20pm movie.

We didn’t really want fast food, but we also didn’t want to take a chance on going somewhere we’d have to wait, or potentially get bad service which would make us miss the 7:20 showing.

After a little discussion we chose:

Now I had never been there, the kids had and so had Claudine. She warned me that it wasn’t any good, but it was food. It’s pizza for crying out loud. I thought of the saying: “There’s good pizza and great pizza, but never bad pizza. And, never, never, bad free pizza.”

Well, that was proven untrue last night. It was cheap enough, $27 for two adults and 3 kids, but not worth that. The place is a gold mine though, any time you can suck $7 out of people for food who’s ingredients cost about $2.00 or less regardless of how much they eat is a great business model.

I think that was my biggest problem with the pizza. For the most part it was basically cheese and a spattering of one ‘other’ ingredient, maybe two. But none of them really any good. Eatable? yes, but not good. The only good thing was the ‘Cheesy Garlic Bread’ but you can only eat so much of that.

We did end up taking too much time so we had to defer to the 9:40 showing. Which meant after dinner we wandered around Cincinnati Mills for a bit. Maria got to sit and talk with Santa so that was good. For a Saturday night Cincinnati Mills was hurting. There wasn’t anyone there.

The Movie:

We took the kids to see: Mr. Magoriums Wonder Emporium

A clean ‘G’ rated flick that wasn’t animated.

It was clean, and keeping in mind the intended audience it was probably pretty good.

The ending seemed like they ran out of budget and just decided that they were at a good place to stop. For a rated G flick it was probably OK. B+ at best, more like a B- but the kids thought it was OK.

The tally for tonight’s extravaganza:

$28 at Cici’s Pizza, cheap, but you could taste it was cheap with every bit.
$7 for candy at Jungle Jims in an effort to save money at the concession stand at the movies.
$35 for tickets, two adults, 3 kids
$30 at the concession stand for 2 large popcorns, and 5 drinks. $3.50 for bottle water is absurd but it is what it is.

Total: $100 for dinner an a movie.