Some people travel for the solitude, some people travel to broaden their horizons.
And some people, well they just travel for the McDonald's Chicken McNugget sauce.
Way back in 1998, McDonald's released a special-issue spicy Szechuan dipping sauce for its McNuggets as part of a cooperative promotion for the release of the Disney film, Mulan.
Fast forward nearly 20 years and the all-but-forgotten sauce made an appearance on the adult animated science fiction series Rick and Morty which appears on the Cartoon Network.
Soon after the episode aired, the sauce quickly attained pop icon status as fans swarmed to social media to demand that McDonald's bring back the sauce. A Change.org petition was even created, which garnered more than 38,000 electronic signatures.
So, McDonald's obliged.
But in what some are calling a serious misstep and others are calling marketing genius, McDonald's issued a statement that a limited number of sauces would only be available at select shops across America and on one day only, October 7, 2017.
Which promoted a call for road trips throughout the country that nearly rivaled the excitement over last August's solar eclipse.
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The Fresno Bee was among the newspapers to publish a list of the nearest locations-in Bakersfield, Modesto and Gilroy-all nearly a two-hour drive away. The long rides did not seem to daunt sauce fans, at least one of which took the day off from work to plan her road trip.
Sadly, when fans arrived at their destination, they learned that for this promotion "limited amounts" meant each store was given only 20 packages. With lines rivaling that of Best Buy on Black Friday, McDonald's employees took to creating a lottery style system to award the sauce to the hundreds of waiting fans.
Things took an ugly turn, though, as fans started to chant, riot and even threaten employees.
In Los Angeles, the McDonalds on La Brea had to call the police to help disburse the crowd of more than 500 people hoping to get a taste of the beloved sauce.
After the fact, fans have even called for a boycott of McDonald's for running out of the sauce.
McDonald's, which has struggled with declining sales and popularity in the U.S., has been testing new products and technology to stay relevant. Who knew all it would take is a 20-year-old Chicken McNugget sauce?
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The fast-food company has since announced it plans to release "Lots more #SzechuanSauce" and that details would be coming "soon."
This time, apparently, there will plenty of sauce to go round. No road trips necessary.
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