When I was planning my trip to Yuma with my dad, I had it all planned out. We would stop at small, family run roadside eateries and experience all of the best road food that the southwest had to offer. I would chat with the cooks in the kitchen while photographing their simple and honest food, then we would travel on down the road to the next stop.
Um. Yeah, not so much. The reality of is that since I didn’t plan our roadside stops (I’m a terrible planner) so far we have only had limited success in finding authentic road food. I am curious about how many chain restaurants I will mistake for local joints on this trip (so far one). And to be honest, along Interstate 40 the options at the exits around the gas stations where we have stopped have not been the best. Chains and truck stop diners for the most part.
You wanna know why most truck drivers seem to be overweight? Truck stop diners. All of these places have menu items like “Long Haul Breakfast” and “Truckers Dinner” which basically consist of 3000 calories meal of meat, carbs and saturated fats. No salads. There are many professions that need lots of food to function. Like, say, lumberjacks. Lumberjacks need a big breakfast because they are chopping down trees all day. Truckers sit. For hours on end. They don’t need 3000 calories to do that. I can safely say that after driving 1400 miles on a truckers diet, I feel like a fat piece of shit. Tonight, when we arrive in Yuma where we will stay through the week I am going to get some running in. Believe.
Other than dinner last night at surprisingly good Thai restaurant in Amarillo where I had a weirdly pink pad thai, the food has been tasty, but heavy as hell and not very photogenic. I have been documenting the food with my cell phone in an attempt to capture a vintage postcard effect and have had very unsatisfactory results. So I’m not sure how much food I will actually be sharing on this trip. It’s only day two, and we have done nothing but drive, so who knows how this will unfold.
The country is amazingly beautiful out here, for sure, and I am really enjoying seeing America. The vastness of this country is an idea which I understood in theory and observed from planes flying over it, but never really understood just how big it really is. Before I get all snapshotty here on the blog I have to remind myself that the endless travelogue could get tedious. There is an early episode of The Simpsons where Marge’s sisters come over to the house and bore the family to death with hundreds of vacation photos. Torture. I’m going to do my best to avoid that here on the blog, but here is a quick sample of some of what I’ve been seeing all day long.
Today we head south from Flagstaff to Yuma. It snowed in Flagstaff overnight and looking out the motel window we have five or six inches to clear off the car. Apparently the temps will rise rapidly as we head south towards Phoenix. More to come…
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