Best things we ate and drank on the road in 2013

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Neil
FoodMap_2013

Click for larger view.

It’s no secret that we take our eating and drinking seriously, especially when traveling. In 2013 we traveled over 7,000 miles and visited 17 states. We have an unwritten road trip rule that we will not eat at any chain restaurants. That leads to us discovering a lot of great local eating establishments and watering holes. It proves you don’t need to be in a big food snob city to have an amazing meal. For example, one of the best charcuterie plates we’ve ever had was in Fargo, North Dakota. Who knew? So, in no particular order … here’s what tickled our palates most memorably in 2013.

Neil’s Best Food:
Bourbon & Coke Pork Bahn Mi Tacos – Woodshed Smokehouse, Fort Worth, TX
Watermelon Caprese – Pepper Sprout, Dubuque, IA
Beef Stroganoff – Depot Grill & Pub, North Platte, NE
Mint Pie – Hays House, Council Grove, KS
Wild Rice Hot Dish – Douglas Lodge, Lake Itasca, MN
Warm Pretzels – Potosi Brewing, Potosi, WI
Gumbo – Augusta, Oxford, IA
Molasses Spiced Elk Loin  – Mural Room, Jackson Lake Lodge, WY

Nick’s Best Food:
Charcuterie – HoDo, Fargo, ND
Tootsie’s Cinnamon Rolls (homemade by Tootsie herself) – The Eatery, Rockport, WA
Sweet Potato Fries – Root Down, Denver, CO
Candied Bacon – Café Genevieve, Jackson, WY
Elk Chop with Blueberry Sauce – Bohemia, Hot Springs, AR
Montana Meatloaf – Many Glacier Hotel, Glacier National Park, MT
Italian Lemon Cream Cake – Nicola’s, Omaha, NE

Neil’s Best Drinks:
Huckleberry Shake – Huckleberry Patch, St. Regis, MT
Summer Daze Doppelweiss – Red Lodge Ales, Red Lodge, MT
Espresso Oak Aged Yeti – Great Divide Brewing, Denver, CO
Brain Drain – Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge, Milwaukee, WI

Nick’s Best Drinks:
Pumpkin Pie Martini – Pepper Sprout, Dubuque, IA
Serendipity – New Glarus Brewing, New Glarus, WI
Wild Huckleberry Wheat Lager – Great Northern Brewing, Whitefish, MT
Witch Hazel – Blue Jacket, Milwaukee, WI

2013FoodDrink

Tootsie’s cinnamon roll, candied bacon, Wild Huckleberry Wheat Lager, mint pie, Great Divide beer sampling, Charcuterie

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Happy Holidays!

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Nick
image

The Rookery, Chicago, IL – December 2013

Wishing you a very joyful and festive holiday season!

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Historic Hotels of America

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Neil
HistoricHotels

Top: Pfister Hotel Lobby. Bottom Left: Nottoway Plantation. Bottom Right: El Tovar Dining Room.

Every good traveler loves a great historic hotel. Our recent stay at the Pfister in Milwaukee reminded us about the Historic Hotels of America program from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This designation was originally introduced in 1989 to promote heritage tourism and now features more than 235 properties nationwide. The honor is given to hotels that have “faithfully maintained their historic integrity, architecture and ambiance.” They must be at least 50 years old, listed on (or eligible for) the National Register of Historic Places and recognized locally as having historic significance. Searching the list is a great way to find lodging with an authentic, local flavor. Many of the historic city hotels also happen to be centrally located in downtown areas, another huge plus.

Reservations can be made at historichotels.org and there is a discount for National Trust for Historic Preservation members.

In our travels we have stayed at these Historic Hotels:  Pfister Hotel – Milwaukee, Hilton Milwaukee City Center, Le Pavillon – New Orleans; Nottoway Plantation – Louisiana.
Dined in these: Old Faithful Inn – Yellowstone NP, El Tovar – Grand Canyon NP, Bright Angel Lodge, Grand Canyon NP
And had drinks here: Intercontinental Mark Hopkins – San Francisco

All of these have been great experiences and receive high kicks of approval.

HistoricHotels2

Left: Bright Angel Lodge Lobby. Right: Le Pavillon Hallway.

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Kick of the Week: Milwaukee, once again

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Nick
Pabst Brewhouse, Milwaukee, WI - November 2013

Pabst Brewhouse, Milwaukee, WI – November 2013

We’ve just returned from our third annual trip to Milwaukee, WI. With great food, beer and culture, and just over an hour’s drive from Chicago, it’s a perfect city to spend a long weekend. Of course, we revisited some of our past favorites (Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge; Coquette Cafe) but also spent some time exploring new things.

Here are some of our favorites from this trip:
– Pfister Hotel: We lucked out using Hotwire and got a great rate for this historic hotel, opened in 1893 in downtown Milwaukee (centrally located, a short walk to all downtown attractions and the Historic Third Ward).
– Pabst Brewery and Milwaukee Brewing Company tours:
Having toured the Miller and Lakefront breweries in the past, we decided to check out new places this time. Since Pabst is no longer produced at the Pabst Brewery, the Pabst tour focused on the history of the brewery and its importance in Milwaukee and US beer-making culture – very insightful and entertaining.
We ended up doing the “open house” option (offered every Saturday) at the Milwaukee Brewing Company, since the regular tours were sold out . This turned out to be a more unique experience: $15 got us a mini-tour of the facilities, a souvenir pint glass, and 2 hours of unlimited sampling!
– Grohmann Museum: a great little find, this museum (part of the Milwaukee School of Engineering) has the world’s largest art collection dedicated to the evolution of human work – mostly Dutch, German, and French paintings, stained glass windows, and a rooftop sculpture garden.
– Blue Jacket (dinner): A restaurant focusing on “third coast” products. Inventive flavors, original cocktails (my whiskey had been butter-washed), all-in-all a great meal.
– The Noble (brunch): We went for their Monday Brunch – the only day brunch is served, recommended by our bartender at Bryant’s. Get there right when they open as this 30-seat place gets busy quickly.

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Reading Material: The Lost Continent

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Neil
LostContinent
 
To continue on the theme of a solo man’s journey through America, I just finished reading Bill Bryson’s 1989 book “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America.” His 1980s journey follows nicely in the footsteps of John Steinbeck’s 1960s “Travels With Charley” and William Least Heat Moon’s 1970s “Blue Highways.” The difference being Bryson didn’t have a dog and he drove a Chevy Chevette, not a van. Imagine doing nearly 14,000 miles in a Chevette, yikes. Bill had been living in England for a decade when he decided to return to his home country to make his self-consciously nostalgia-driven “journey of discovery”. As one does.
 
The road trip was completed in two segments, an Eastern loop and a Western loop, both starting and ending at his childhood home in Des Moines. As usual, Bill writes in his own special brand of snarky humor, but it seems even more amped up here than in his later books. Being a fellow native Iowan, my reaction to chapter 1 varied from “amused but mildly offended” to “laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe”. The insults he hurls at nearly every type of people he encounters are masterful and sometimes go on for paragraphs, such as one that begins with the line “Iowa women are almost always sensationally overweight…” If you think that’s bad, wait until he gets to the South: “The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.” (I can relate. In summer 2009 there was a language barrier incident at a Sonic drive-in in Tennessee we still laugh about.) In the end you know he’ll come around and learn to appreciate his homeland, “And I felt guilty for mocking them. They were good people” but the journey to that point is really quite hilarious.
 
Bryson visits popular landmarks around the country like Gettysburg, Mackinac Island and the Grand Canyon. He incorporates memories of traveling in the family station wagon in the ’50s and ‘60s with his current experiences. It’s interesting to compare his version of a place when his route crosses the paths of Steinbeck or Heat Moon. It’s even more interesting when his path crosses a High Kick Travel destination that we’ve recently experienced in person. Some I agreed with, like his take on the Hyatt hotel in Savannah; and some I did not, like describing the landscape around Devil’s Tower National Monument as a “flat, featureless plain” when in fact it is quite hilly and beautiful.
 
One observation I have is that in 1988 he must not yet have been a very good traveler. He gets lost trying to follow the simplest directions and basically thought nearly everything he saw was boring. When he complains that the mountains in Colorado aren’t interesting enough, I found myself saying out loud, “You lived in England!” I think a part of any great trip is finding something to enjoy at each turn, and there are a few points where Bryson seems to just be going through the motions to get from point A to point B. Maybe that’s just what happens when you’re in a Chevette for 14,000 miles.
 
Overall another must-read for any road trip enthusiast.
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Halloween 2013: Year of the Bison

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Neil
BisonCostume

(L to R) Nick Bison, Real Bison, Neil Bison.

When selecting Halloween costumes, we’ve frequently looked to our travels for inspiration. National Park rangers and Lewis and Clark were past crowd-pleasers. This year we looked to the animal kingdom and settled on a mammal we came across on several occasions during the past year from Oklahoma to Yellowstone to North Dakota … the American bison.

While people often use the terms bison and buffalo interchangeably, the bison we know are actually a separate species and only distantly related to buffalo which are found in Africa and Asia. The average bison weighs between 930 and 2,200 pounds and they have a life expectancy of 12 to 24 years. Although they are the heaviest land mammals on the continent, they are surprisingly fast and agile. They can run at up to 40 mph and jump 6 feet straight up in the air. This behavior must be quite rare, since not a single bison we witnessed this year looked to be in much of a hurry at all.

The habitat range of bison in North America before European settlement extended from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and from the central Canadian plains to northern Mexico with a population around 60 million. Over-hunting and disease reduced their numbers to just 750 animals by 1890. Today there are approximately 500,000 in North America, mostly in national parks and on private ranches where many are raised for  their meat, because they also happen to be delicious.

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Kick of the Week: Chicago Marathon

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Nick
Chicago Marathon Post Race Party in Grant Park, Chicago, IL - October 2013

Chicago Marathon Post-Race Party in Grant Park, Chicago, IL – October 2013

Congratulations
to 1st-time marathoner and fellow road-tripper
Emily Nelson.
You did it!

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Marathon Weekend in Chicago

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Neil
2013 Route, click for official marathon website.

2013 Route, click for official marathon website.

One of the most popular marathons in the world takes place this weekend right here in our own back yard. Along with Boston, New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo, the Chicago Marathon is one of the six World Marathon Majors. Competitors love it for the flat terrain and fast course which makes it a great race to go for a personal best or a world record. Last year 37,455 runners participated with an average finish time of 4 hours, 32 minutes.
The 26.2 mile loop course begins and ends in Grant Park and winds its way through 29 city neighborhoods in between. We have special reason to cheer this year because road trip partner Emily is running the race. Good luck Emily! There may be a high kick or two from the sidelines.

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Kick of the Week: Boulevard Brewing (Kansas City, MO)

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Nick
Boulevard Brewing Co., Kansas City, MO - March 2013

Boulevard Brewing Co., Kansas City, MO – March 2013

As is evident from many of our posts, we appreciate beer – in particular local brews. When passing through Kansas City, MO last March we decided to spend some time touring the Boulevard Brewing Company. Tours are offered free of charge every day of the week and conclude with beer samples in their tasting room. We always enjoy exploring local breweries on our trips for their unique atmosphere and product we can’t necessarily get at home. Some of our other favorite brewery tours include New Glarus Brewing Co. (New Glarus, WI), Lakefront Brewery (Milwaukee, WI), and Great Divide Brewing Co. (Denver, CO).

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Seattle to Chicago: TMI

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Neil
Click for full-size view

Click for full-size view

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