Travel -: Soul food

Travel - Headlines from Soul food 13 Jul 2011, 7:05 pm In 1985, my parents piled my brother and me in the family truck and drove us from our northwest suburban home to Yellowstone National Park. We wove a leisurely path past Nebraska's prairies, South Dakota's Badlands, Wyoming's hot springs. The scenery was awe-inspiring and unforgettable. At least I assume it was. My brother and I spent the drive with our heads buried in Archie comic books. I suppose we were fairly typical, as obnoxious ingrates go -- though today we would spend the drive posting status updates on our handhelds. (ìOMG. A moose.î) The point is, my parents resisted the urge to ditch us at a rest stop along Interstate 80 and, even more remarkably, continued to take us on family vacations. We skied. We snorkeled. We camped. We had it good. Some of my most cherished memories are from our travels -- the board games, the laughter, the time we drove for an hour in search of the perfect boulder upon which to picnic, our stomachs growling as we drove past picnic table after picnic table. You know what I don't remember? (In addition to the scenery out West.) The food. I'm sure a great deal of thought was given to our meals -- how to prepare them, when to stop for them, the restaurant at which to enjoy them. I just can't tell you what we ate. Happy meals? Local delicacies? Breakfast bars? Now that I'm a parent, charged with making sure food factors into the stretches of swimming, sightseeing and playgrounding that comprise vacations with a 5- and 1-year-old, I view dining through a slightly different lens. We need to eat for sustenance and, in a lot of cases, to have a seat. But I have yet to plan a trip -- or a day or, heck, an hour -- around food. I'm not sure this is a good thing. My husband has a Chipotle app on his iPhone, which we resort to with embarrassing frequency. We peanut-butter-and-jellied our way through Disney World. My son once ate ketchup for dinner. (Really, I reasoned, does the accompanying hot dog add any nutritional value?) I sometimes wonder if this approach robs us of some of the cultural richness that traveling provides: if my kids wouldn't benefit from visiting a family-owned taqueria instead of a multinational burrito chain. But then I recall the one exception to my food-based travel amnesia. The summer before I entered high school, my mom took me to England. We hit Stonehenge, Stratford-upon-Avon, Trafalgar Square. I remember ordering lasagna at a pub. (Bad move.) I remember trying muesli for the first time at a bed-and-breakfast. (Ehh.) But one meal stands out -- ranking up there, memory-wise, with spying Big Ben and traipsing through castles. For dinner one evening, my mom and I shared a bottled water and a sleeve of heavenly chocolate wafers. We were driving, no doubt through some charming village, and neither of us felt like stopping. So we drove and ate, passing the sleeve back and forth until nothing remained but crumbs. I remember the wafers, but mostly I remember the warmth. The feeling that we were doing something special, my mom and I. Something we'd never done before and may never do again. And I don't mean cookies for dinner. Fine dining can wait. In the meantime, pass the ketchup. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed.