Roadtrip Food
I’ve been suffering from a severe bout of wanderlust. I'm feeling that feverish Summer craving for adventure. I’ve been taking short weekend jaunts to new and old places, exploring and eating and turning over stones. But, I’m dreaming of a bigger adventure, making plans to wander farther and wider, and revisiting past travels.
In the Fall, I found myself struck with a quick opportunity to cross a big item off my bucket list. In California, there were a car and two dogs that needed to end up in Boston and New York, respectively. I had a long weekend coming up, giving me just enough time to hop on a plane and hop in the car for the long drive home. A cross-country roadtrip had been a fantasy of mine, and I could not wait to see this land in the most American way possible, by coasting across it on four wheels with a willing co-pilot and two furry friends in the backseat. I could just see us, windows down on an early fall day, driving towards dramatic thunderheads collecting on the distant horizon, having deep conversations that made the time pass like nothing at all. I had romantic visions of stopping at hidden roadside diners for midnight breakfast and winding on tangled highways over wooded mountaintops and down into great valleys shimmering with manifest destiny. I dreamed of regional delicacies, of discovering little pockets of the country through chance and a well timed Yelp search.
The reality of the situation was that we had close to 4,000 miles of road to cover between Southern California and Boston, and only four days to do it. So, my lofty ambitions of discovering perfect little treasures off the beaten path, pit-stop ice creams, and charming mom-and-pop restaurants wafting sweet scents of home cooking onto the pavement, all of that was squashed by the reality of interstate truck stops and chain restaurants. After driving through the eerie Mojave Desert and climbing through the breathtaking beauty of the Rockies, I realized just how great the Great Plains truly are for mile after straight endless mile. There was very little romance in it all — but there were certainly a lot of potato chips.
In my foodie snobbishness, I pretend entire aisles of the grocery store don’t exist. I try to stick to the outer sections, or better yet shop at farmers markets and specialty stores for the freshest, most seasonal ingredients. There is none of that on the road. Freshness takes a backseat to speed and portability. The closest thing to a farmers market on 1-80 was a bruised granny smith apple in the basket at checkout of the flying-J.
I quickly acquainted myself with the three main truckstop food groups: salty, sweet, and caffeinated. The salty food group serves as a weary travelers main source of nourishment: varieties of potato chips and pretzels that would boggle the mind, seeds and nuts and other munchies designed to keep the mandible occupied and the mind alert on the road. The sweet food group is there solely to tempt even the strongest willed after hours staring at the horizon and painted double yellow lines. Nostalgic candies, hostess cakes, a revolving door of artificial colors and engineered flavors. Finally, the walls of any roadside stop are lined with every variety of caffeinated beverage imaginable, from hot coffee to cold coffee beverages to all manner of canned and bottled bubbly beverage behind glass doors like back-lit sentinels there to stand night watch alongside an exhausted driver.
On the road, I love to pop gummi bears. A jumbo bag of sour coated brightly colored bouncy candies will keep me happy for miles of highway. Give me an occasional ice cream stop, whether a gas station blizzard or a roadside stand gelato, and I will drive happy. My co-pilot navigated towards the other food groups. He scoured coolers for rare flavors of Mountain Dew and gas station shelves for regional variations and limited editions of potato chips. I learned about Zapp’s voodoo kettle-cooked chips (they are truly a revelation, if you ever come across them) at a neighborhood gas station outside of Denver, Colorado that also housed a smoked meat shop and fishing supplies. We found dill pickle flavored chips at a gas station selling native crafts and vintage dresses somewhere in Nebraska. Somewhere in New York, we bought Maryland crab flavored Lays for the road and small batch hot sauce to take home. It became a gas-stop treasure hunt for trophy flavors to take on the road.
After four days of potato chips and diner breakfasts, we both craved anything that required refrigeration. Somewhere in the middle of Iowa, we pulled into a La Quinta Inn for a few hours of blissful sleep and ordered dinner from the only place open at 1am. I don’t know if it was that delivery salad of wilted greens topped with shredded cheddar cheese and a few little cherry tomatoes, or that I was tucked into delightfully cloudy hotel sheets (that my dog later peed on — don’t tell) after sitting in the car for ten hours, but I have never felt more happy to eat my greens.
