Cousin Reunion #7: A mystery is solved.

One of the great eternal mysteries of life just might be what food you should eat while intoxicated. When I was in college, I was convinced that this food was pizza delivered by the place that accepted meal plan points. But then once students were allowed to have cars on campus, I discovered that the nearest Waffle House was the best choice a drunk person could make at 3 a.m. (assuming, of course, that a designated driver could be procured). In case anyone is wondering, the best thing to order at a Waffle House at 3 a.m. is a sausage melt with hashbrowns scattered, smothered and diced. Maybe peppered if you're feeling crazy. If you wind up drunk in Seattle, a city that lacks Waffles Houses, you go to a place called Dick's where you can get burgers for cheap.

But this weekend I discovered the absolute, hands-down, no questions asked best food to consume while drunk. See, the first night, we had been drinking for several hours, and it had been hours since we had a meal. As you might gather from the posts about meals and snacks at Kanuga, if you went several hours without a meal, you had gone too long. So we started brainstorming with our powerful brains exactly what kind of food we should try to procure. My brother was thinking outside the bun and suggested Taco Bell, but he was shot down in favor of the place that rules the night, Wendy's. Off went a somewhat sober cousin and some drunken support to procure some Wendy's.

I will admit that I certainly didn't plan on solving such a grand mystery of life that night. I didn't have high hopes for Wendy's as a drunken food provider. That's not to say that I don't love Wendy's; if I'm driving down the highway looking for food conveniently close to an interstate, I'm looking for a Wendy's sign and the promise of spicy chicken sandwich with no lettuce. I haven't eaten anything but that from Wendy's in years. So I didn't really know what else they had.

But then my cousins came back with several sacks full of Wendy's dollar menu items. There was a bag of fries as well as a bag of mystery meat items -- chicken nuggets, chicken sandwiches and junior bacon cheeseburgers. And when I took that first bite of bacon cheeseburger, I knew I had found the perfect drunken food item. While I did not conduct a scientific poll, I would wager a guess that many of my cousins shared in the ecstasy that was late night Wendy's. Kudos, Dave Thomas. I underestimated you and your junior bacon cheeseburgers.

What a wealth of food we had for 11 people on just 25 dollars! I even had another half of a bacon cheeseburger, though I'm willing to admit that may have been a mistake as I woke up in the middle of the night with a tummy ache. But was that the Wendy's, or was that the alcohol? Or just the general excitement of solving one of the great mysteries of life? Who can say?

Now, while I have proclaimed that Wendy's is the current champion of late night drunken food, I am willing to entertain the option of creating a new king at future cousin reunions, particularly if any contenders would be willing to drive the food out to us for free.