Eating on the Road

If you've been following our trip blog, you may have noticed frequent mentions of good food!  For us, finding really good food is part of the fun of traveling and enjoying the local culture.  We have two favorite sources for recommendations while on the road:

One of our favorite TV shows is Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on the Food Network.  The show's host, Guy Fieri, travels across the country looking for good food, often in unexpected places.  If you like to travel - or just to dream about traveling - it's a fun show to watch (just don't watch late at night - it makes you very hungry!)  Their definitions of diners and of dives are very broad, but one thing is always true - the food is all homemade and all delicious!  Here's a list of all the places featured on the show - take a look and see if there's one in your hometown.

We arrived in Santa Fe tonight and sought out one of Guy's recommendations here - Zia Diner (see the following photo post).  Wow, the food was amazing!  They had a combination of traditional dishes (meatloaf, shepherd's pie, fish & chips) done with a special flair (the meatloaf had green chiles and pinon nuts in it), plus some New Mexican specialties.  Throughout the trip, Jamie has been telling me over and over that the food is good but not as good as what I cook at home - enchiladas, quesadillas, pancakes, and more - he's enjoyed it all but always says mine is better.  Tonight, he took one bite of his shepherd's pie and said, "OK, Mom, this is finally some place that beat you!  Your shepherd's pie is good, but this is amazing!"  And he and Craig agreed the banana cream pie was the best they'd ever had.

Our other resource for good food on the road is Roadfood - they have lots of books and also a website.  We carry one of their fat guidebooks in the car with us.  You can also look up places by location on the website.  Roadfood is, as they explain, "great regional meals along highways, in small towns, and in city neighborhoods."  It's a tasty alternate to the typical generic fast food that you most often see along the road - sometimes you have to hunt a bit for these local places, but it's always worth the trip!  Dude's Drive-In in Christianburg, VA (a real, old-fashioned drive-in) and Fork in the Alley in Roanoke, VA (mentioned earlier in this blog) are two good (but very different) examples.

So, here we are in Santa Fe, camping just outside the city, in the foothills of the Santo de los Cristo Mountains.  It's a big change for us - a huge RV campground with lots of services.  For the past 3 days we've been camping in the Santa Fe National Forest - no services at all but one of the most beautiful places we've ever camped.  So, we're missing the natural beauty a bit but were very glad to get showers this afternoon!  The WiFi is a nice treat, too.

Tomorrow we plan to see Santa Fe - mostly the Old Town area.  We can tell just from driving around tonight that it's a very cool place.