Quartz City

Grand Isle, LA

Grand Isle, LA… Southeastern-most point of the trip.

I ran across Boudreau & Thibodeau’s diner in Houma completely by accident and it turned out to be one of the best meals of the trip. Miles better than what I was finding in New Orleans even.

Disco Rats and the Owl of Justice

Disco Rats and the Owl Of Justice. From the “Best of CNN news graphics” collection.

[via ipecac.net]

Eastbound V – Texas

“I saw miles and miles of Texas, all the stars up in the sky
I saw miles and miles of Texas, gonna live here ’til I die.”
– Bob Wills

Marfa Lights viewing

and onwards

According to the Find Your Spot quiz, Round Top, Texas was the number one place in the US that I absolutely should not move to. Of course I had to check it out, and while it’s not that bad in person (hell, you could probably rent a house here for a hundred bucks), I still can’t help but think that a City Confidential episode or tornado target is in its future.

Note to road trippers in this part of Texas: most diners and restaurants are closed in the afternoon or evenings – assuming that they aren’t closed completely for December-January. I lucked out at the Chappell Hill Sausage Company which closed just as I was arriving at 4pm, but the reward was some astonishingly outstanding BBQ sausages (and homemade oatmeal walnut cookies).

The Mayor of Burgerville

Last April I had a chance to eat at the Burgerville in Vancouver, WA. I’d been wanting to go, Burgerville was described as being to the Pacific Northwest what Inn-N-Out Burger is to Southern California and I wasn’t disappointed at all. A damn fine hamburger that could stand proudly to the cherry pie at the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks.

A great burger chain needs a cranky, iconoclastic founder and Burgerville founder George Propstra (who just died last week) was no exception.

Propstra retired from the company more than a decade ago, but he never really left. He was regarded as Burgerville’s best customer and toughest critic. The day before he died, he was working out details for a bakery he planned to open next year in downtown Vancouver, The Oregonian reported.

Propstra opened the first Burgerville USA restaurant in Vancouver. He steadily expanded the operation into a 39-restaurant chain with 1,600 employees.

The belief in supporting his neighbors turned out to be good business, eventually causing Burgerville to be best known for its seasonal fruit milkshakes, Walla Walla sweet onion rings and Tillamook cheeseburgers.

Propstra became known to local television viewers in the 1980s, when he appeared in a pair of commercials. In one of them, he disdainfully smacked and flung a competitor’s frozen burger patty.

New Year random linkage

Various and sundry stuff I didn’t get a chance to blog yet…

A tour of the transmission tower infrastructure on top of Mt. Wilson in Los Angeles.

Since there’s really no difference between expensive designer audio cables and plain-old wire, cable maker Monster Cable has decided to sue anyone using the word “Monster.” I can’t wait for the inhabitants of Monster Island to weigh in with their opinion.

You know the dollar is in trouble when even the drug dealers abandon it.

Theme Park Maps for just about any park in any year.

Eastbound IV – Marfa TX

Come for the Giant locations, stay for the east-coast-art-meets-Texas collision. The CLUI’s report on Marfa covers everything in detail.

The Hotel Paisano is pretty swoonworthy.

The border patrol blimp (a.k.a. “tethered aerostat radar system“) west of town on US-90 is kinda unsettling to drive up on in the middle of the night.

Eastbound III – Roswell NM

The signs welcoming you to town indicate that it’s “the dairy capital of New Mexico”, but Roswell has clearly hitched it’s tourist dollar wagon to the rapidly stale alien kitch zeitgeist. The International UFO Museum is the King Hell tourist trap in town but the knockoff alien “museums” surrounding it are much more interesting. Apparently, all you need is an alien “grey” dummy and a pickup truck full of old computer parts, circuit boards, and industrial contaminants. Correct spelling is not necessary but the savvier museums have free Wi-Fi. I especially like the Apple StyleWriter printer reconstituted as an alien stasis machine. The rest of town is your usual assortment of southwest blight with a Wal-Mart the size of an aircraft hangar and little else to do except drink and listen to metal.