Venturing Into The Great Unknown

This is our first travel day. After a two hour ferry ride to the mainland, we will have approximately four hours of driving, in order to cover the 374 km to Centralia, Washington. That time does not include the inevitable wait at the border (which shouldn’t be too bad on a Monday) or going around Seattle (which will probably not be nice when we hit Seattle at 3pm – which also doesn’t allow for any delays caused by the construction around Seattle). I am hoping to arrive in Centralia around dinner time. Fingers crossed that it won’t be a late dinner :).

I can’t believe the trip is right around the corner. It seems like only yesterday that I was returning from the second annual trip. Now to give you some background into these annual trips…

In 2010, my mum and I embarked on a cross-country trip from Vancouver Island, BC to Halifax, NS, in order to deliver a car from my dad to my sister. Over that three weeks we spent together, we realized that we had a common interest in food, more specifically Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. We also discovered that we enjoyed travelling together (when I was younger I travelled more with my dad as my mum does NOT fly). Over the course of the next year, my mum and I tossed around the idea of visiting some of the places that Guy had visited on his show. What started out as a few offhand comments, grew into a two-week trip that stretched down the West Coast from Vancouver Island to Carmel, California.

Last year we visited many of the same areas, but added Reno, only went as far south as Sacramento/Santa Rosa, and spent much more time in Portland, OR. Portland, it seems, is our favourite city out of the ones that we have visited so far. Not only does it have a several awesome restaurants from Triple D, but it has tons of food trucks from Eat St., and is also a beautiful city with tons to do, but I will deal more with Portland in a future post.

This year we are adding Idaho to the trip. We have shied away from Eastern Washington on previous trips, but decided this year to “do something different”. This year is going to be more relaxed than prior trips – less “windshield” time and more “poking around” time. We will still be going to some of our old favourites, but I’ve added some new ones that will broaden my horizons (I’ve always been a picky eater that does not do well with new-fangled “weird” foods…and I don’t like seafood or red meat – like I said…I’m a picky eater).

Below is an overview map of the trip, and cities broken down by day…

3rd Annual Food Network Tour Overview

Hopefully as I go along, I will have time to post pictures and running commentary on our journey this year. I try every year to blog or even just record the events of the day, but always find myself either too tired, or too busy looking up different things on the internet that we discovered over the day. It is amazing how seeing a sign for a vaguely familiar-sounding name can lead you off onto a Wikipedia tangent that involves several open tabs on my browser. More often than not, my mum will go to sleep while I am still ‘researching’ or talking to my husband online, but she will still expect a report the following morning on what I had learned. Oh, did I mention that she is a retired high school language teacher…needless to say my research needs to be thorough/in-depth enough to be able to answer any questions that my mum may have as follow-up. If it isn’t, it gets added to the list for the following night’s research. Now don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy the learning aspect, I just get frustrated when it’s not an ‘easy’ find…and a lot of them are vague clues that I have to go on. If I end up blogging this trip, I will share some of the weird things that come up in our conversations while we are driving.