As we started out on our last day on the road, Anna and I had a sudden urge for a good breakfast of bacon and eggs. Our choices were limited on the Interstate, so when we spotted a Denny’s sign from the highway we took the exit and found ourselves on an old stretch of Route 66.  “How bad could a Denny’s be?” we asked ourselves.

Pretty bad.  The Denny’s we arrived at smelled odd inside and had a lot of people waiting for tables, so we set off in search of something else. What we found was the funky little restaurant above, where we had some perfectly good eggs and bacon in a joint with a little character.

We continued on and reached Las Vegas before nightfall. Anna braved the horrors of my apartment and continued with her online teaching chores. The next day I gave a her a real treat — driving her to the local T. J. Maxx, so she could buy a new suitcase. Then we had a late lunch at an Irish pub near my place — we were both hammered and felt that some hearty pub food was just what we needed. It hit the mark exactly.

We woke early the next morning and I took Anna to the airport to catch a 6am flight back to North Carolina — and suddenly the epic road trip was over. My body was still vibrating, as though I was still in the car, and my mind was sapped from the swirl of experiences encountered during a month on the road.

I’ve now written blog posts about most of it, and feel partly human again. Time to get back to staying put and writing fiction.

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Anna and I stopped for the night in Albuquerque.  We had no particular reason to stop there — it was just a convenient place to break our mad dash back to Las Vegas.  On Yelp I found a restaurant called Antiquity in Old Town that sounded interesting, so we took the exit for the restaurant and discovered a Best Western Plus right by the off-ramp.  It had thoughtfully provided an area with tables outside for smokers (above) where Anna I rendezvoused for the half mile walk to the restaurant.

The place turned out to be jammed, with a 45-minute wait for a table, so we passed the time in the Old Town plaza, which has few really old buildings but was pleasant enough at twilight.

Antiquity turned out to be worth the wait.  It’s housed in a genuinely old building just off the plaza, dimly lit with wooden dividers between the tables.  “Very romantic,” said Anna.  “Too bad I’m here with my brother.”

The restaurant specializes in filets of beef wrapped in bacon and broiled, which is what I had.  It was delicious.  Anna had a perfectly cooked salmon filet.  The service was slow, because of a big party in attendance, which gave us time to quaff many alcoholic beverages and shed the tensions of the road.  The staff was extremely friendly and apologetic about the wait.

It was raining when we went back outside after the meal, and we didn’t know if the area of our walk was safe at night, so we asked the staff for the number of a taxi service — but this they would not supply.  Instead the owner himself appeared and offered to drive us back to our motel in his own car, which he did.  He was a cheerful fellow, and told us that the next day would mark the 15th anniversary of the opening of the restaurant.

A fine last night on the road — with the pleasant discovery of a good restaurant and some good people in an interesting place.  It’s the sort of thing that can still happen on what’s left of The Great American Roadside.

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One of the joys of taking a southern route across America is that you run into a lot of Whataburgers along the way. Anna and I found this one in Amarillo, Texas. I’m not sure Anna found her Whataburger as impressive as I found mine — to me, any fast-food burger served with jalapeños on it is a treat.

By Amarillo we were in fast-travel mode. Anna, who has been a classroom English teacher in public schools for many years, has now gotten into the online tutoring of students with reading problems.  She was able to carry on this work, which involves assigning and grading papers and online conferences with other teachers, on the road, in motels and even in the car.  Motel wi-fi and a hot-spot service on her computer kept her plugged in everywhere.  It’s sort of amazing, but was a bit stressful, too, doing it on the run.

So we hauled ass after New Orleans, so she could fly home and work in peace — but we still had one more adventure ahead.

My friend Mary is an expert pie maker. She baked two of them for us while we were at Lake Butler — a no-cook berry pie, which tastes like a classic French tarte, and a blueberry-peach pie, pictured above.

Graciously she sent us off on the road with the remains of the blueberry-peach pie, which was my breakfast of choice well into our New Orleans stay.

It was sad to see the last of it going:

. . . going:

. . . and finally nothing but a memory.

New Orleans means staying at the Parks-Bowman Mansion — a fabulous Victorian home in the Garden District — hanging out with its owners, my friends Adrienne and Bill, and of course eating amazing food.

Above is the wood-fired oven at Cochon, a place that serves up magical dishes, centering around pork, as the name suggests.  Fried pork ears are a specialty.

A visit to Commander’s Palace, in the background above, just a couple of blocks from Adrienne and Bill’s house, is a must for me on any trip to New Orleans — we dined royally there, as always.

I also sneaked in a lunch at Fiorella’s in the Quarter, which serves fried chicken almost as good as my mother makes, and a trip to Café du Monde, for coffee and beignets.

One afternoon as my two sisters and I wandered around the Quarter, we started looking for a place to grab a quick bite for lunch. By chance we stumbled upon Hermes, the bar attached to Antoine’s, the legendary New Orleans eatery, founded in 1840 and the oldest continuously operating restaurant in America.

There, Anna was able to try for the first time one of Antoine’s original signature dishes, Oysters Rockefeller, which amazed her.  The staff also gave her and Libba a tour of the whole restaurant, just closed down after the lunch hours, including the small private dining rooms where much clandestine romantic intrigue has undoubtedly played out in years past.  The tour was just the sort of beau geste you come to expect from people in New Orleans.

Libba, not fully recovered from her exertions for the wedding, decided she needed to fly home from New Orleans, so my sister Anna and I pushed on by ourselves.

We took with us two muffuletta sandwiches from the Central Grocery. These are enormous, complex Italian sandwiches, peculiar to New Orleans.  They can be found all over the city, but the Central Grocery makes the best ones.  They served for lunches and late-night snacks on the road, until Anna got tired of them.  I was still eating mine and part of hers back in Las Vegas.

You can stay at the Parks-Bowman Mansion yourself, because Adrienne and Bill now offer four of its rooms on airbnb.  The rates are a bargain for central New Orleans, in a magnificent home filled with wondrous folk art, hosted by people who embody the creative and fun spirit of New Orleans.  Check it out — The Red Room.

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We took the coastal road along the Florida Panhandle on our way to New Orleans, stopping for a night at Apalachicola, Florida, a little shrimping port on the creek that flows into Apalachicola Bay. I’d been there before, and wanted to revisit Up the Creek, a funky seafood restaurant overlooking the shrimp-boat docks.  We had a fine meal there at twilight, watching the shrimp boats head out for their night’s work.

On the way to Apalachicola, greedy for seafood, we’d stopped for lunch at the roadside joint above.  The fried oysters my sister Anna had were not great, alas, but the fried shrimp I ordered were excellent.

Traveling with my two sisters, both of whom are excellent drivers, made for a different kind of road trip.  I’d done almost all of the driving on the way to Maine — my nephew Harry has a learner’s permit but can only drive with a licensed California driver in the car.  It was nice to lap the miles in shifts.

On my last visit to Apalachicola I’d stayed at a Best Western, but driving into town this time we decided to take a chance on the Gibson Inn, which dates from 1907, during Apalachicola’s brief history as an important lumber shipping port.  It was a fortunate choice — the place was reasonable and comfortable, with a good bar (which like almost every other drinking and eating establishment in Apalachicola closes at 9pm) and wide porches with big rocking chairs to pass the time (and smoke) in.

One reason we chose a southern route back to Las Vegas was for the great food and interesting places to stay we knew we’d find close to the highways.  We were not disappointed in the Florida Panhandle.

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Our destination in Florida was Lake Butler, which is near the small town of Winter Garden, an hour or so west of Orlando. Winter Garden is an old-fashioned town, where my friend Mary Zahl (below) grew up and now lives with her husband, my oldest friend, Paul Zahl. Mary’s family has a cabin on Lake Butler, and she and Paul offered the hospitality of it to us.

It’s an old-fashioned cabin, dating from the 50s I guess, on a lake that now attracts celebrities, like Shaquille O’Neil, who build mansions there. It still manages to have a sleepy air.  It has crystal clear waters and is a lovely place to recharge your batteries on a long road trip.

On one night of our three-day sojourn, we went to a fine little restaurant in Winter Garden called The Tasting Room.  It specializes in small dishes, like a tapas restaurant, but I had a stupendous main-course entree of shrimp and grits.  Everything was delicious.

On another night we went to a great barbecue joint in town, The Four Rivers Smokehouse — the highlight of which for me were some stuffed jalapeño chiles that really packed a punch.

Above, while stepping out for a smoke, I peeked in to see what I was missing in the way of conversation.

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Lee and I drove from Maine to my sister Libba’s house in western New York State, where Libba and Simon had already arrived. Lee flew back to her home in Los Angeles, then Libba and I headed south to North Carolina — the start of my long drive back to Las Vegas.

Meanwhile my sister Roe had driven my nephew Harry and my mom back to North Carolina, and Anna and her husband Pete had driven their clan back there, too.

Libba and I took a route through the Shenandoah Valley to avoid Washington, D. C.. The ghosts of John Mosby (above) and Stonewall Jackson feel ever present in that valley. One of the roads we traveled was even named for Mosby — see the picture at the top of the post.

We stayed a night in Virginia, then reached Wilmington, N. C. the next day. As soon as we hit the Tar Heel State, we stopped for barbecue, at a reliable chain called Smithfield’s — reliable but not in the same class as Jackson’s in Wilmington, which makes barbecue that tastes like it did when I was a kid:

Oh, my . . .

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My sister Libba and her husband Simon and her son Jason make the best smoked fish in America — mostly salmon but also trout and tuna. If you’ve ordered smoked salmon at a fancy restaurant or bought it at a gourmet food shop in a major city, chances are you’ve eaten it, not always under their company’s name, Samaki, because they supply it to a lot of companies that re-brand it under their own names.

That’s my nephew Jason in the picture taped inside the window above, back in his childhood days in Africa — the guy whose wedding I just attended in Maine.  That’s his dad Simon below.

They started out smoking fish in Kenya, where Simon and Jason were born — samaki is the Swahili word for fish — supplying it to game lodges and safari camps, but political instability there caused them to move to the U. S. in 1983, where the business has continued to grow by leaps and bounds, though they remain a relatively small, artisanal producer, shipping about 300,000 pounds of fish a year.

The fresh salmon is soaked in brine and a little brown sugar, then rolled into the brick-oven smoking room:

Smoke from burning sawdust of various aromatic woods is fed into the smoking room from this stove:

Then the fish is sliced and shrink-wrapped and sent on its way:

Samaki doesn’t do a lot of online selling to individuals — their volume business has gotten too big to concentrate on smaller orders — but they will, at this link:

Samaki, Inc.

. . . where you can see a short documentary on their business done for the New York Magazine web site, featuring Jason, the now newly married man.

The wedding was over, we’d left Islesboro and were heading home, but we weren’t done with lobster — not quite yet. We decided to stop at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset, Maine and brave the long line there for what is reputed to be the best lobster roll in the world. You wouldn’t get any argument about that from me. A large hot dog roll is served up at Red’s with more lobster than a hot dog roll was ever meant to hold — there’s more than one lobster involved.

It’s served with melted butter to pour over it and is astonishing.

We’d meant to stop at Red’s on the way up to Islesboro but a hellacious traffic jam in Wiscasset threatened to make us miss our reservation on the ferry to the island, so we crept by the legendary stand wistfully.  Now we had a goodly measure of redemption.

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. . . and time for a lobster feast, at the house my niece Keaton and her husband Jimmy had rented for themselves and their two kids

Jimmy boiled up the crustaceans.

The kids were suitably impressed.

The adults no less.

The dog, who had a persistent case of diarrhea from lustily drinking seawater at every opportunity, was indifferent but generally content.

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