iPhone: The Backpacker's Best Friend?

How much technology do you need with you when you go on a backpacking trip in the wilderness? Or, perhaps more to the point, how much do you actually want with you?

My general rule with packing for a backpacking trip is to bring as little as possible, and only as much as you're willing to carry. When a friend brought his iPhone on a recent backpacking trip, I scoffed at the idea. Why on earth would you want to bring that confounded device into the wilderness? There won't be any signal, and you certainly can't pound in a tent stake with it.

The iPhone compass: because real compasses are a snooze-fest

As often happens post-scoff, my initial skepticism softened over the course of the trip as it became evident that the iPhone might in fact be worth considering on your packing list.

With an iPhone you get all of these:

• Camera
• GPS & Compass
• Light
• Emergency contact (if you happen to have signal)
  
• First aid info
• Taking notes, writing journal entries
  
• Plant/animal identification apps
• Dictionary to settle important arguments
• Calculator for adding up your score in Rummy
  
• Level: you can check to see if your campsite is level (it never is)
• Entertainment: games, podcasts, music, showing friends stupid pictures/movies
• Fending off bears
  
• More potentially useful stuff hidden amongst the thousands of other apps
  

There are some drawbacks to many of these functions, in fact I'd venture to say that it's not particularly good at any of the important things. The camera is pretty abysmal and has no flash, but it does well enough as a point-and-shoot during the day. The GPS functionality is limited. The light is no match for an LED flashlight. Note taking takes longer than a pencil and paper. Many apps require connection to the internet. As an emergency contact device, the iPhone is not the best phone for maximizing reception in low coverage areas. Battery life on iPhones can be pretty bad, especially when you're, say, using it. The speaker on the iPhone is hopeless. Needless to say, the iPhone isn't built for withstanding the elements. On the plus side, for all of these functions, limited as they may be, the iPhone is light and extremely compact compared to carrying an individual tool for all of the above functions.

But here's the rub: by using an iPhone in the wilderness, you might just be reserving a special room in hell. You'll get to share this room with people that talk on cellphones while riding horses, smoke on chairlifts destroying the air for everyone behind them, blast loud music or have a gas-powered generator for their television in campgrounds, people on snowmobiles that zoom by while you're cross-country skiing, and a suite of other people determined to spoil the experience of nature with unnecessary bits of modernity.


While hiking through an old-growth Douglas fir forest in the Marble Mountains, I thought I heard people behind us. I stopped to listen; I could hear thin, distant voices, but couldn't make out where they were or what they were saying. Were there people gaining on us from behind? I doubted it, as we were hiking at a fair clip on a rarely used trail and hadn't passed anyone. When my iPhone-toting friend walked up, I found the source of the voices: he was listening to a podcast about the state of venture capital in the current economy through the tinny speaker on the iPhone.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Hmm? Oh, listening to a podcast. I already finished Madeleine Albright at the Commonwealth Club - you can listen to it later if you want."

I wasn't inclined to take him up on this offer and instead pictured myself snatching the phone from him and crushing it under the heel of my hiking boot with a satisfying crunch.

Now I'm the last one to fight the future – after all I have multiple Twitter accounts, blog in several places, and recently got a little too excited by seeing Chad Vader and Kevin Pollak in a hard-fought bout of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots — but there are times when the trappings of technology interfere with our enjoyment of the world. This was one of those times. I go on backpacking trips to get away from tweets and touchscreens: I want to build fires, swim in pristine lakes, hunt down wild onions for making soup, make seats more comfy by padding them with bracken fronds, and bore my friends to tears by explaining the concept of buzz pollination. No offense to Madeleine Albright and venture capitalist podcasters, but I would be happy if they stayed at home. Well, unless they wanted to carry the tent and some extra beef jerky.

Fabulous Bathrooms of the Nevada Desert

It's safe to say that most people visiting Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada are not there to see the bathrooms. I wasn't there to see the bathrooms either, I was there to see the red sandstone formations and the sweeping desert landscapes — or, more accurately, I was in search of an antidote to Las Vegas. Finding out en route that Valley of Fire was where they filmed Captain Kirk's death scene in Star Trek Generations was nerd-icing on the cake. Had I been there earlier in the year, the nerd factor would have been even higher, as I would have been on the lookout for the rare Golden bearclaw poppy, Arctomecon californica, which despite the name has never been found in California. Red rocks, Vegas remedy, Shatner, and rare misnamed poppies, but not bathrooms — after all, who goes out to the desert, much less anywhere else, to look at bathrooms?

But when confronted with a bathroom like this, how can you not take notice?

This bathroom has it good

Entering the Valley of Fire from the east, coming from Lake Mead, you have to pull over to pay the $6 entry fee (which happens to be the best $6 you'll ever pay). Most people will ogle the bizarre water-pitted rock formations that extend up the road, but if you turn around you'll find this bathroom sitting quietly in the most stunning, lonesome setting, not even appreciating how lucky it is to be there.

This bathroom was not a solitary occurrence: at nearly every stop in the park you can find a bathroom set amongst the most improbably dramatic scenery. At the rock formation called "The Seven Sisters," you get:

This

And this

And this

And then amongst all of this mind-boggling natural beauty, you find this:

Another fabulous bathroom

Further up the road you come to the sadly bathroomless Silica Dome, which is where Captain Kirk perished in Star Trek Generations after foolishly hurling his corpulent self onto a precariously dangling catwalk in search of an errant garage door opener [watch for yourself]. You can see why they chose to film Star Trek here: the terrain is otherworldly with stripes of colored rocks smashed together like Neapolitan ice cream.

View from Silica Dome

After a brief intermission at Silica Dome, the spectacular bathrooms continue when the road ends at White Domes.

Bathroom, bollards, and boulders

To continue your bathroom tour of the southern Nevada desert, why not visit the nearby Hoover Dam? Just over an hour away, Hoover Dam is one of the most frequently visited tourist destinations in the area, but again I doubt anyone comes to see the bathrooms.

Coming from the Nevada side as most visitors do (it's free to park on Arizona side, but you do have to walk a bit further), you're treated to a marvelously useless sign intended for visitors who somehow failed to notice the massive, impossible-to-miss, 1244 foot-long Hoover Dam stretching across the gorge.

Where's that confounded dam?

Oh, is this it?

Inside the dam gift shop, it's impossible to miss all of the dam jokes. You're greeted by an audio recording emanating from a mannquin dressed like a miner that's filled with multiple dam joks. T-shirst read "My Parent's Got Me This Dam T-Shirt," and mugs say "I went on the dam tour," etc., etc., ad nauseum. "Are you tired of the dam jokes?" I asked the guy behind the counter. Dam right he was. "Hey, where's the dam squashed penny machine?"

Found it

Back outside the dam gift shop, following the sign to the top of dam, you'll soon come to the bathrooms. Unlike the rather unassuming bathrooms at Valley of Fire, the bathrooms at the Hoover Dam are dramatic Art Deco affairs precariously perched on the very rim of the dam.

That's the dam men's room

Snazzy Art Deco ante-bathroom

The bathroom is small inside, but on the plus side the men's room has a pair of unusual Art Deco urinals that look like oversized athletic cups on raised pedestals (an example here). Oddly, they're free-standing and without any sort of stall wall, so anyone entering the bathroom gets treated to a straight-on view of someone peeing (I guess men were less pee-shy back in the days of the Hoover administration).

One of the more interesting bathroom views in the world

Dam towers

For me, there's no comparison between the crowded superficial tawdriness of Vegas and the vast beautiful terrain that surrounds it, but most people come to Vegas to gamble, drink, see a few shows, and never even think of setting foot off the Strip, much less driving an hour outside the city. No bathroom inside a hotel shaped like a cheap replica of the Chrysler Building can compare to the ones at Valley of Fire, no matter how glitzy. To put this in poker terms so the gamblers can understand, Vegas is a full house, but the Nevada desert is a royal flush.

In Bigfoot's Living Room

She frowned and almost spat when she spoke; clearly I had inadvertently wandered into sensitive territory, and she was probably tired of the question. How could I not ask? All available space on the restaurant walls was covered in cast iron pans with people's names neatly painted in red and white; there was a sign over a doorway that declared this to be the world's largest privately owned collection of cast iron cookware. One pan proudly held the name of Doug McConnell, host of TV's Bay Area Backroads.


My friends and I had just emerged from a week-long backpacking trip in the Marble Mountain Wilderness in far northern California, and we were in desperate need of some real food. There wasn't much to choose from in the little town of Orleans, so we ended up at a place that simply said "Cafe" outside. A local who had told us where to find food said, "We just call it the greasy spoon."

The Greasy Spoon

“We keep writing Guinness trying to get in the book,” she said pouring the brown stuff that was standing in for coffee that morning, “but apparently they don’t have a category for it.” She paused, thinking dark thoughts about the Guinness Book of World Records editorial staff. “So we’re just waitin’ – what else can we do?” she grumbled.

We changed the subject, "I see you have a stage - do you get bands coming through here?"

"Oh yeah," she said, brightening her mood, "mostly local bands. Sometimes we'll have bands come in from Forks of Salmon."

Forks of Salmon is now without any doubt my favorite town name. Also, any band out there looking for a good name, please consider Forks of Salmon.

To those that don't know California well, it's a land of surfers, movie stars, hybrid driving liberals, and patchouli-soaked pot-smoking hippies. But California is huge, and the more you explore it, the more it defies any simple stereotypes. I was trying to explain this to some friends in London, telling them that even San Francisco isn't at all what most people expect — ironically they had been to San Francisco with their parents and the first thing they saw when they walked out of their hotel was a guy walking down the street in assless chaps. Okay, admittedly San Francisco will have the very occasional assless chaps guy, but the cultural terrain changes dramatically as you travel around the state. Here we were, many hours from anywhere, in a dark, cast-iron-clad greasy spoon where the lumberjacky locals who looked like they had been plucked from the cast of extras on Northern Exposure argued over their card game at the corner table, and bands came in from Forks of Salmon. The road we were driving down was marked "The Bigfoot Scenic Byway" and we had passed an Adopt-A-Highway sign that read "In memory of Critter" and a full-sized billboard reading "Produce the Birth Certificate!" We were no longer in assless chaps territory.

Driving down the Bigfoot Scenic Byway

This was exactly what we were shooting for when we planned this trip. We weren't looking for the world's largest privately owned collection of cast iron cookware per se, but we were intent on finding a remote and quiet corner of California for a backpacking trip. To me, backpacking is all about solitude, so when you plan a trip in the summer high season in California you have to choose your trail carefully. Popular trails in the central Sierra can get miserably busy, and there's nothing worse than a traffic jam on a wilderness trail. I knew we had picked well when I told people that I was going backpacking for a week in the Marble Mountains and I got multiple looks of confusion, one persone that thought I was headed to Vermont, and two people that thought I was going to Danang, Vietnam. While a trip to Vietnam sounds pretty good, these Marble Mountains are a section of the Klamath Range just south of the Oregon border, smack dab in Bigfoot's living room.

Bigfoot in his living room

People in Bigfoot Country take this stuff seriously — it's not just a couple of eccentrics with Bigfoot-shaped mailboxes — the whole area is covered with Bigfoot signs, Bigfoot-branded businesses, Bigfoot power stations (seriously), and more Bigfoot statuary than you would believe. In fact, to add another unconfirmed, non-Guinness-approved world record to the trip, the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek has what is supposedly the world's largest Bigfoot statue right in the parking lot.

That's one big Bigfoot

Bigfoot with a couple of grimy backpackers for scale

Bigfootprints

I have to admit that when we set out on the trail a week earlier, I had some small amount of hope that I would catch a glimpse of something and convince myself I had seen Bigfoot. I didn't actually want to see Bigfoot — that would uncomfortably rattle some core beliefs about science and reason that I'm not especially keen on rattling — but thinking that maybe I might have possibly caught a glimpse of something that could have been Bigfoot (but was probably just the back end of a black bear) seemed like it would be entertaining, not to mention fodder for a vastly exaggerated story I could tell for years to come.

At the entrance to the Marble Mountain Wilderness from Haypress trailhead

I'm sad to say that we saw neither hide nor hair of Bigfoot, in fact we had a megafauna-free trip for the most part, despite being in the area that reportedly has the highest concentration of bears in California. At least in part, the lack of animals was due to a large wildfire that had occurred in the Marbles in 2008, and we spent the first day of the trip crossing eerie burned landscapes.

Luckily we were out of the burn zone by the time we hit Cuddihy Lakes, and we were treated to the green meadows, forests, and rock-walled lakes we had hoped for, and the wildflowers were still putting on a show despite being a bit late in the season.

Walking around the first of the Cuddihy Lakes

Sneezeweed in bloom

A new one for the life-list: Klamath gentian, Gentiana plurisetosa

Fishing at Cuddihy Lakes

Our food rations were light on this trip, so we were hoping for fish to supplement what we carried in. The first lakes we hit had been fished hard by summer hikers and pack teams and apart from giant salamanders there wasn't anything moving in the lakes, and we got no bites.

The uppermost of the Cuddihy Lakes

The ultimate goal of the hike was to reach Spirit Lake, described by California outdoors writer Tom Stienstra as one of his favorite lake destinations in the state and a site considered sacred by the local Native American people. Looking at the map, Spirit Lake doesn't look like much more than a small pond, so we didn't know exactly what to expect.

Spirit Lake in the sun as we arrived

Spirit Lake was beautiful - is it Top 10 list worthy? I wouldn't say so, but it does have some really good things going for it. For one, there are two incredible campsites perched above the lake near some of the best fishing spots, and it's far enough into the Marbles that most pack teams and hikers don't typically make it this far, so there were plenty of fish to be caught. Spirit Lake doesn't wow with grandeur and towering granite cliffs or the like, but it has a primordial unspoiled feel that you don't find many places, so it's a fabulous place to go to get a break from the modern world.

Just a few hours later, the spirits descended

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Spirit Lake is that it's fed by a warm and somewhat salty spring, and when an unexpected cold weather system hit the area just a few hours after we arrived, eerie swirls of fog appeared and were whipped around by swirling winds like ghosts on the lake.

Larkspurs in the fog

Thick fog on Spirit Lake

I kept looking around for Bigfoot lurking in the fog, but he was not to be found. Luckily you don't need to see Bigfoot to feel like you've glimpsed another world, all you really need is a breath of fresh air and wall covered in cast iron pans.

Airstreams and Moon Germs

With all of the news coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in the past few months, I was surprised to see almost no mention of the San Francisco Bay Area's connection to this historic event mentioned in the local papers. Only a few people I talked to knew of the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda, and even fewer knew that the Hornet was the ship that recovered the astronauts from the Apollo 11 & 12 missions after splashdown.

The USS Hornet

View of San Francisco from the flight deck (flag at half mast in honor of the passing of Senator Kennedy)

Beyond the association with the lunar missions, the Hornet was instrumental in several key battles during WWII, in fact the Hornet was the ship from which the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo was launched, later made famous in the Spencer Tracy film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Coincidentally, Jimmy Doolittle himself was born in Alameda where the Hornet was based and still stands today.

I love exploring large ships, partly because I retain some element of disbelief that something so massive can float, but also I have a peculiar fascination with staircases on ships (gangplanks being a close second). I don't care where they go, I want to climb them. They're really just ladders pretending to be staircases, and I always have that moment of pause at the top when I have to decide whether I should be going down face-first. That's how the cool guys do it in movies like Under Siege — no self-respecting action star would back down a set of stairs no matter how steep — and lord knows I want to be at least as cool as Steven Seagal, so I generally give it a go. [Apologies for the minor digression here, but you really must read the IMDB bio of Steven Seagal, which was written by himself, his publicist, or a deranged stalker - it's hard to tell which.]

Steven Seagal would totally go face-first down this one

Maggie opts for the non-Seagalian method of descent

I have to admit, I liked finding an escalator on the ship, but you would never see a Tommy Lee Jones knife fight here

For space travel aficionados there are countless bits of interest scattered around the hornet: photo exhibits of the splashdowns and recovery missions, the Apollo space capsule used for testing the heat shields, an SH-3H Sea King helicopter used in the movie Apollo 13, and bits of snazzy space fashion.

Lunar couture

Comfy rescue basket

Peering in the Apollo space capsule

The highlight for me among the collection of Apollo artifacts was what is undoubtedly the world's most historically important Airstream trailer.

The one-of-a-kind Airstream MQF

Fearing that the returning astronauts might be carrying some sort of unknown moon germs, a special "Mobile Quarantine Facility" was devised for the astronauts to keep them separated until doctors felt it was safe to release them. The Mobile Quarantine Facility had to look cool and futuristic — no mere Winnebago would suffice — so they used a super-modern Airstream that was specially sealed and fitted for the purpose.

Winnebago's concept for the MQF was unfortunately never commissioned

The astronauts' exit hatch from the MQF

The crew of Apollo 11 talking to Richard Nixon from a safe distance

When I entered the Mobile Quarantine Facility, there was a small child of about 3 years old standing there. "Hi!" he said. "Hi," I replied. It turns out that what he really meant was, "Hi, I just crapped my pants inside of a hermetically sealed Airstream." Maggie climbed in, turned around and climbed back out.

Holding my breath inside the MQF

Everyone gets a chance to be an Apollo astronaut

One small step for man, one giant gulp of moon germs

The USS Hornet is well worth the visit, even if you have little interest in the space travel history. Most of the ship is open for you to wander at will, with most rooms set up as they would be on a working ship, and there are guided tours into some of the otherwise closed parts of the ship. The stunning views of San Francisco are worth the price of admission alone. The USS Hornet Museum is open 10 am - 5 pm, 7 days a week, adult admission is currently $14 - bring a coat as it gets windy and often cold inside the ship. If you time your visit well, you can combine it with a trip to the monthly Alameda Point Antiques & Collectibles Faire or a tasting/tour of Hangar 1 Vodka, or Rosenblum Cellars.

Face Recognition

In a recent piece, I suggested, given the rise of face recognition software being used in applications like Apple's iPhoto and web-based photo services like Google's Picasa, that we as a society were on the verge of a major breakthrough. In the very near future, we might be able to locate pictures of ourselves in the vacation photos of complete strangers.

You might think, "Well, whoopee - what's so cool about that?" You'll have plenty of time to ponder that question because, after my recent experiences, I think we're a very long way yet from any global face recognition breakthrough.

My new laptop came with the latest version of iPhoto and I was able to really play with the face recognition function for the first time. At first I was impressed: when you go to a picture with a face on it and click "Name," iPhoto was quickly able to pick out the faces in the picture:

iPhoto was easily able to find my face in this photo

After that, all you have to do is label the faces it picks out and then iPhoto is supposed to go through your library and pick out other occurrences of this face - sounds simple enough. Knowing ahead of time that face recognition technology is far from perfected, I expected some level of error. Sadly, iPhoto's ability to (a) locate faces, and then (b) identify them based on a set of manually labeled pictures, doesn't quite live up to even my already lowered expectations and it comes up with astonishing amounts of false positives. On the plus side, these misidentifications proved incredibly amusing. Essentially everyone I know, male or female, young or old, bearded or clean-shaven, was identified as possibly being me - but it didn't stop there: I was numerous faceless inanimate objects as well.

Here are some of the best things that were tagged as me or Maggie in my photo library:

Andy:

• A pork pie with sliced pears
• A fake aquarium plant
• A baby in a bear suit
• A clump of dirt
• A yeoman warder
• Sir Walter Raleigh
• A spooky doll
• A goose
• Sir Joseph Banks
• A cluster of tomatoes
• A gelato spoon
• A Malaysian curry
• A bagel
• Scary clown head
• A chanterelle mushroom
• The Golden Gate Bridge
• A pizza
• A snowball
• A handrail
• A solid black square
• Grandpa Leo's birthday hula dancer
• A spatula

Maggie:

• Statue of Ron Howard
• Cardboard cutout of Elvis
• A granite counter tile
• A Parisian living statue
• Rear end of a pig
• A frosty mug of root beer
• A penguin
• A snowy mountain
• St. Francis of Assisi
• The Eiffel Tower
• Barrack Obama
• This creepy mannequin
• A camel
• Lettuce
• A "No Left Turn" sign
• A carnivorous plant
• A bus tire
• Her own knee
• Indian man with large scarf

Not Maggie

To be fair, iPhoto did get a lot of photos correct. However, given that a rather large percentage of my photos have either me or Maggie in them, I'm not sure it did significantly better than random. Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer for the ability to find out-of-focus pictures of myself accidentally ruining someone else's travel photo.

How to Plan a New York Trip If You Like Food

The best thing about being a foodie traveler today is that there's more information available than ever before about local food and restaurants around the world. The problem is that most of this information isn't in guidebooks, it's scattered in magazines, newspapers, blogs, online review sites, or locked away in the brains of your foodie friends.

To be fair, guidebooks vary by publisher, location, and author, and some are significantly more thoughtful about food than others, but overall guidebooks are simply insufficient if you're a devoted foodie. Guidebooks have the built-in constraint that only a limited space can be allotted to food content, but the biggest problem I find is that the guidebooks aren't written specifically for me and my personal tastes. I don't really know why this is, in fact someone should really do something about that, but for some untold reason guidebooks are written to appeal to a broader audience, so I find that only a small fraction of the recommendations in most guidebooks are exactly what I'm looking for. I've included below a breakdown of the types of restaurants one can typically find in any given guidebook in the form of a colorful pie chart:

So how do you plan a trip if you're a foodie and you want to tailor a trip to your own peculiar food tastes? Write your own mini-guide. My version of this is almost embarrassingly low-tech: an extensive, sometime multi-page, always sloppily-written, longhand list that I keep in my pocket during the trip. Maybe once I break down and get a smart phone this will change (and, honestly, why I haven't typed these lists is beyond me), but I've done quite well so far with the hand-written list.

My well-used list of food destinations from my recent New York trip

When planning my recent New York trip, I came up with a few categories of places that I wanted to hit during this trip (e.g., pizza joints, gelaterias, hummuiots [see below]), then I pulled together info from various sources including places I've loved from previous trips, recommendations from friends, Yelp, Chowhound, TV food shows, New York bloggers, and various New York publications.

Luckily, Maggie and I have compatible traveling styles: we both like to have a small number of activites planned in advance (typically only things that require advance planning like theater), and then we come up with a list of things we might like to do during the rest of the trip. This allows flexibility in case the weather is bad or unplanned laziness strikes, and it generally lets you do exactly what you want to do at any given moment, which is something I look forward to on vacation. With the food list in your pocket, no matter what neighborhood you find yourself in, there's a good chance that the list has something tasty nearby to try. If not, then guidebooks, concierges, cabbies, serendipity, and your nose can fill in the gaps, and it's always fun to include some off-list experiences.

Highlights from the list:

1. Pizza. I mostly covered the pizza experiences in the previous New York post, but this serves as an illustration of one way the list helps keep you flexible: we wanted to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which neither of us had done before, but we didn't know what day we were going to do it as it relied heavily on weather. What we did know is that whenever we did cross the Brooklyn Bridge, we'd be right near Grimaldi's at lunch time, so having the address/directions, say on a hand-written list in your pocket, could come in quite handy.

On the way to Grimaldi's (looking back at Manhattan)

2. Hummusiots. I had read an article in the New York Times about the rising popularity of hummusiots, restaurants where hummus is the star of the show. I had been to one such place in London (Hummus Bros) that had disappointingly under-seasoned hummus, but the NY Times article talked up several locations and got me craving some really good homemade hummus.

Hummus with chickpeas from Hummus Place

I have to give credit to my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook on this one, because the best hummus we had in New York was from the amazing Taïm in the West Village, recommended in the guidebook but not even mentioned in the NY Times piece. If you go to Taïm, don't stop at the hummus: make sure you try the falafel, the salads, the brown sugar lemonade, and pretty much anything else they make. If you're curious, Taïm has a series of podcasts that show you how to make many of their dishes (including the hummus).

3. Breakfast. Anyone who knows me well (or even slightly) knows of my love for all things breakfast-related. Despite having a free continental breakfast at our hotel, always a plus, we had to go out for a few breakfasts to explore a bit of Manhattan's breakfast scene. I could claim that I got the tip to go to Clinton Street Baking Co. in the Lower East Side from a recent issue of Lonely Planet Magazine, but in fact I saw it first on an episode of Throwdown! with Bobby Flay, where they competed with Bobby Flay to see who makes a better blueberry pancake.

Breakfast at Clinton Street Baking Co.

I had every intention of ordering the pancakes until I saw the menu. I love places that make it difficult to order by having too many tempting things on the menu, and Clinton St. Baking Co. is definitely one of those. In the end I went with the Southern Breakfast with eggs, cheese grits, fried green tomatoes, and sugar-cured bacon, while Maggie went with a southwestern-style breakfast roughly the size of her head that involved homemade biscuits and tomatillo sauce.

4. Root beer floats. Always on a quest for amazing root beer floats, I did some research on Chowhound and found a few places recommended around Manhattan. At dinner with some of our NY friends at Peasant in Nolita, they snagged our list and eagerly scoured it crossing out things that weren't worth our time, adding arrows, exclamation points, and underlines to things we should definitely do, and even writing in a few additional places that fit our interests. Shake Shack got an emphatic arrow, and prompted one of our friends to say in satisfied caveman voice, "Shake Shack! Shake Shack gooooood!" This was high praise indeed.

Inside Shake Shack - keen eyes will observe a rare and very discerning choice here: Abita Root Beer on tap

The fact that they had Abita Root Beer on tap, my current favorite root beer for making root beer floats, was an excellent sign, as was the fact that they use homemade frozen custard. Sure enough, the float was excellent, but was overshadowed by the almost supernaturally delicious burgers. These aren't ultra-gourmet burgers (although they do use high quality ingredients), they're just really good fastfood-style burgers but with a sprinkling of magic unicorn horn to make you crave more.

Off-list highlights:

1. The Sturgeon King. I feel ashamed now, but I purposely left Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King off of my list assuming it would be silly and contrived. Boy was I wrong.


We had two other excellent breakfasts out, one at Clinton Street Baking Co., and the other at Blue Ribbon Bar, but our breakfast at the Sturgeon King was far and away my favorite. Complaining that the H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side makes incredible bagels but doesn't toast them, our Shake-Shack-loving friends pointed out that the Sturgeon King serves toasted H&H bagels with their fish platters. That alone was enough to convince me to give it a try.

Inside Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King

I know smoked fish for breakfast isn't for everyone - and I don't want it every day myself - but when I'm in the mood and it's high quality, it can be amazing. This was one of those times.

H&H Bagels with a Nova lox and whitefish platter

Beyond the excellent food, The Sturgeon King has some serious character, not to mention some serious characters working there, which makes only adds to the experience. This ain't TGI Friday's.

2. A Brief Seinfeld Moment. I didn't eat here but had to take its picture when we happened to walk by on the way to a friend's apartment:

It felt wrong to see this view without a laugh track and bass riff

3. Cheesecake. I wasn't planning to go out of my way for cheesecake on this trip, but I chanced across a Junior's counter just as they were closing for the night in the food hall at Grand Central Terminal.


Junior's cheesecake is a bit sweet, the crust gets a tad soggy, but the flavor's good and the consistency has the mix of lightness and richness that I look for in a cheesecake. Interestingly, it tastes even better when eaten off the ticket counter in the main hall of Grand Central.

Between the list and the off-list places, we ate extremely well, in fact I can't recall a trip in which I was happier with the food, and we mostly avoided very high-end places. Next step, typing the list so I don't have to rewrite it every time.

For the über-curious, here's a map of all of the places we ate on our New York trip, and I'm happy to go into silly levels of detail upon request.


View New York Food Spots - July 2009 in a larger map

Oh Deer

Spotted today in Alameda Towne Centre, a place known more for cheesy piped music and chain stores than for offbeat humor:

Please do not feed or sit on the deer

If you trust the sign, feeding the bronze deer statues might be unwise. I suppose it might make the statues reliant on human handouts and lead them to favor human foods, certainly less healthy than their typical diet of wild landscaping plants.

Is this intentional humor, or are they really worried about people trying to give the deer a sip of their Jamba Juice?