Wawa in Tampa Bay

Wawa Philly soft pretzels

My son said to me the other day: "You know what would be good right now? A soft pretzel from Wawa." He loves 'em.

Of course, he didn't grow up in the Philly metro area like I did, so his taste of soft pretzels is limited to the ones at Wawa. They're pretty darn good, mind you, but to me there's something strange about buying them from a nice, bright, clean convenience store.

I always remember driving into odd parts of Philly when I was in college to work on computers for various industrial/business clients I had. You know how you see guys selling newspapers or flowers on highway medians? Well, in this case they had guys selling pretzels. They'd have huge squares of pretzels and I think they were ridiculously cheap, like 3 for $1. They guy would break off however many you wanted and wrap 'em in a piece of paper. If you were lucky they were still warm and hadn't absorbed too much exhaust from the traffic. Yeah, but when they were good, they were damn good. As a poor college student I'd get $5 worth and warm them up in the microwave for a cheap meal over several days. They'd sit in your stomach like a salty, doughy brick, but it was better than being hungry.

I don't know what the Tampa Bay equivalent would be...they got rid of the hot dog vendors in thong bikinis. Nobody sells Cuban sandwiches on the highway medians.

It'd be nice if Wawa came to Tampa Bay, then my son could get his soft pretzels. :-)