A case study in travel snacks: gas station pound cake

I enjoy adventure and traveling, but I may be an anomaly among many of my energetic twentysomething peers in that I dislike long road trips. I hate to miss out on substantial amounts of sleep and my bowels become irregular and angry on excursions longer than 8 hours.

Still, the one aspect that makes road journeys tolerable, pleasurable and exciting, even, are visits to roadside snack shops, which are often the convenience stores near gas pumps. Those treasure chests of fountain drinks and individually-wrapped salty or sweet snacks are a haven for the car-phobic, food-obsessed like me. You can't go wrong with a bag of Chili-Cheese Fritos and 20 oz. Diet Coke. Hostess donettes (6-pack) and Vanilla Nesquick can serve as a tranquilizer to bitter child travelers. And who can deny the explicit joys of a Nerds Rope and Orange Sunkist. Not this girl!

But on my most recent trip, to North Carolina with my snack-loving family, my brother-in-law emerged from a convenience store during a roadside stop with a treat that blew my mind apart.

Its very presence took my breath away. Pictured here is the 4.5 oz., 450-calorie ridden cake from "The Brownie Baker," surely a disappointing knockoff of Little Debbie and other well-respected snack cake distributors.

But what was remarkable about this cake, at least for me and equally food-literate sister, was the invisible but obviously present stigma surrounding its buttery crust.

Perhaps because of its large size, its unpopular brand name and/or its presence near stale coffee in the store from which it came, my sister and I knew that, usually, this cake was eaten only by 47 year old women named Pam who've given up on life. They buy it quickly and put it in their sad brown purses until they get home and devour it in their dark basement on a floral sofa before a rerun of Home Improvement.

It's really sad to think about. Pam is really sad.

My brother in law did the right thing, though, by taking the cake home and cutting into eighths, as pictured above. Everyone in the family partook, and we all agreed it was dry.

Brother in law claims it was the grinning, elf-like man on the cake's package that motivated the purchase.

No one believes him.