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Chapter 2: Food! and More Food! and Gratuitous Pictures of Food!

10/16/2015

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“I have to work on a project tomorrow and need a designated eater. It’s on desserts. You game?”

Not five minutes through the door when Julia fired this loaded question. I don’t even like sweets. As a kid I stockpiled Halloween candy all year to use as currency in the inter-sibling economy established between my brother and I. But Julia, whose chosen profession requires her to test and report on all things edible in San Antonio- and at times beyond- wouldn’t be sampling just any old treacle. Or so we thought. In any event, I was game.

You know you’re baked into the food community when you’re on speed dial to receive text messages like, “I have a baby wild boar in my freezer. Do you have a party coming up? Shitty part is that they removed the head and the feet. Bastards!”

And when you’re Julia, your natural response is, “OMG. Fuck a party. Let’s just you and me eat that baby.”

Five days in the Lone Star State and I wasn’t impressed by the offerings so far. Granted, the bulk of my ingested experiences were clocked at an amusement park and a high school football game. Not the best food foot forward (or possibly the very best, depending who you ask). While I was pleasantly surprised by the proliferation of kombucha throughout the state, incarnated in everything from cocktails to sorbets, with the exception of this and a small handful (mouthful) of well-assembled plates, the “lone star” could snarkily refer to Yelp reviews of the fare at large. By far the most appetizing ingredient in Frito pie is the plastic spork used to eat it. And a visit to the State Fair of Texas verified what one could easily deduce from the average patron’s waistline: that the default technique is to deep-fry. When in doubt, deep-fry.
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Agronomists have engineered a self-frying carrot genome. The end is near.
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Big Tex didn't grow 55 feet tall by eating only fried butter. Or maybe yes?
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Of all the things one could carve out of 3000 pounds of butter, the committee chose THIS?!
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HA HA! CORNDOGS ARE FUN!
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The infamous frito "pie".
There is one engineering ingenuity that deserves a degree of reverence: Deep-fried liquids. Coke, lattes, beer, sweet tea. I don’t know how they do it, but if we put a man on the moon, the oily alchemy of liquid to a solid state doesn’t seem so miraculous. As I meandered down the stalls, I wondered if the government had considered creating a branch within the Department of Defense, and offering these wily chemists a seat in the Situation Room. The “Battery” would take on a whole new meaning.
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Important distinction: "Most Creative" vs. "Best Taste"
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Whatever happened to loving liquids just the way they are?
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But the real freak show is the secret to how they deep-fry liquids.
But San Antonio is a food town. And I don’t mean just Tex-Mex. “A city on the rise”, I was delighted to observe an all-but-abandoned Chipotle, the residents opting in favor of local flavors over the corporate burrito chain. So on Saturday morning, after a rookie mistake of downing five breakfast tacos (YOU try choosing between chorizo, nopales, al pastor, al Mexicano, and chicharrones), we launched into our sugary survey through the city.
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Decision making is not one of my strong points.
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Tres "BLEH"ches cake. @ Carmelita's
The problem with Julia is, when you order one dessert, they bring four. It’s a thing of beauty to witness Julia in her element, gabbing with chefs, bartenders, managers, wait staff, friends, strangers- even other food critics. One of Julia’s friends mockingly vented a lesson she learned early on- that any dining excursion with Julia required at least an additional 30 minutes for trade talk and personal catch-up. The way I saw it, the more time between me and the next bite was a good thing. But twelve hours, nine restaurants, and fourteen desserts later, I wanted nothing to do with saccharine stuff again. My companion suspected as much after we spooned the tenth of the day, a sticky olive oil lemon cake, when my words became Jabberwocky and I fell asleep upright on a bar stool. The dance of the sugarplum fairy was temporarily suspended.
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"The tea was nice," and other euphemisms. @ Bird Bakery
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The slave driver and her marching orders
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There is a place that is neither heaven nor hell, but both. @ Cured
After an emergency resuscitative nap, and a liberal application of Sensodyne to my aching dentines, Julia had the sense of humor to suggest not only that we finish the assignment, but also make room for “real food”. Real food entailed vegan summer vegetable curry with noodles, fideo with fried chicken hearts, and a fortuitous stop at a food truck for cochinita pibil. Somehow we tucked these away between two more solid desserts, three apricot spirit cocktails, and a flight of kombucha. At one point Julia enthused that we should travel to Oaxaca and eat our way through the state. I’d have to survive the weekend first.
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Kombucha flight (clockwise from center front): Milky oolong, Green tea, Jasmine-hibiscus, Smoky black. @ Alchemy
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The 11th hour. @ The Old Main Assoc.
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Balkan apricot spirits, lifting ours. @ Dorćol
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Off-menu order. @ Dorćol
It was reassuring to know that Julia had never attempted a feat quite like this before, and that even in spite of my initial setback of far-too-many breakfast tacos, I was keeping pace with the pros. But it was still only Saturday, and Sunday loomed threatening brunch, gelato stop, and huge homemade dinner of roast chicken and all the fixin’s.
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Ladies who lunch. And point at lunch. @ Brigid
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Ready for some aerobic piñata-batting to burn off the gluttony.
I called up a family friend in New Orleans to make arrangements for the next leg of my journey. As we exchanged parting words she pressed inquisitively, “...And we’re going to eat, right?”

Riiiiiight.

Hungry in San Antonio? Jade’s top picks:

Toro Taco Bar BBQ lengua, shrimp & chorizo
Carmelita's Breakfast tacos with homemade tortillas. (Just don’t order 5 of them)
Cured Probably anything
Alamode (get it?) Gelato & panini
Brigid Yum.
Alchemy Kombucha flights, cocktails, and everything from fried chicken to vegan entrees
The Old Main Assoc. Favorite among local chefs. Can’t go wrong.

Denton, Dallas, San Antonio ETC...

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Chapter 1: Parks!,  What it is to Adventure, and Lots of Pictures

10/6/2015

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The ranger leaned in over the glass-topped map, lowered his voice, and asked conspiratorially,

“Now, do you want to do some OFF trail hiking?”

“Ohhh, uh- that depends. Do I need a permit?”

“No. Go to the South Gate station tomorrow. Tell the ranger there I sent you.”
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He saw how the children delighted in the stuffed playthings, and he too wanted to deliver that same joy.
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Petrified tree slice
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Painted desert
And like that I was initiated into the speakeasy underground the U.S. Park Service, gaining “Authorized Only” access, and kicking off a series of solo hikes there and elsewhere with no map, just verbal clues and finger pointing to vague objects on the distant horizon. It always pays to be respectful and inquisitive to fellow humans, and that goes doubly so for park rangers who know where all the cool shit is.

“I’ve only been there twice. Only told one other couple about ‘em. You won’t find them at first, but once you do, you’ll see them all over.” Randy concluded with paternal emphasis, “And watch out for snakes!”​

I strapped on my bag, tightened my boot laces, and began the three mile trek towards the multi-hued mesas, keeping a keen ear out for the signature rattle of that particular serpentine species.
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I had a sense of what to look for, drawing on a cache of images I’d glanced at and surprising stored over the years. I aimed my binoculars to scan over the tumbled blocks, scanning through the light block faces for a distinctive dark surface of the rock, which the Anasazi would have etched to reveal the lighter layer below to leave their tales of antelope, mountain lions, birds… even an extremely accurate spiral sundial to mark the summer solstice.
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Petrified Forest National Park is positively littered with the sparkling crystals of prehistoric conifers. But it’s more than just really (really, really) old trees. Hundreds of years ago the site hosted the Anasazi, the ancient ancestors of the Navajo, whose remnants of ceremonial painted pottery and storytelling petroglyphs survive in fragments strewn over the mesas and washed down through the riverbeds. Long before then even, pre-dinos lumbered through what was swampland. To this day researchers and hapless tourists are still discovering the fossils of new species of Triassic megafauna.
<Freezes lenses.>

What’s that, about 100 feet up, near the mesa top?

<Scrambles up, tentatively springing from rock to rock.>

Stairs? Chisel marks?! Thousands of pottery shards, and … petroglyphs!

Flushed with the excitement of discovery, I spent an hour hopping over boulders, snapping up pics, and trying to imagine the vista and the stone pathway that existed hundreds of years ago before the Pueblo People moved away and this edge of the mesa succumbed to natural forces.
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I lowered my way down to the flat wash, brimming with elation. That’s when I spotted a fossilized joint bone half-buried in the sand. DINOSAUR? PRE-DINOSAUR?! Whatever it was (and it really didn’t matter at that point), my childhood fantasy was complete. I was Indiana Jones for the day.
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They'll name the new species "Jadesaurus Rex"

Me, about now:

If this sounds like adventure, it has been. But adventure, like many things, is a practice and a state of mind. Adventure is a spaciousness that allows for opportunities to be identified and deviations made. Adventure comes in many shapes and sizes.

Adventure is inarguably wandering the surreal, Dali-esque sand sculptures of the Bisti Badlands, encountering a red-tanned naked man wearing only a neon-orange hat, and ducking when a small but determined wind vortex approaches, whirling like a crazed poltergeist. Adventure is crossing over to Mexico because... why not? Most would agree that adventure is tobogganing white sand dunes, waking at 3:45am to witness 500 hot air balloons go aloft, and detouring to chase a huge orange moon.
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Ostentatious Canyon? Magnanimous Canyon? I forget. Some big canyon in AZ.
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Bisti Badlands, NM. Landscaping by Salvador Dali and Dr. Seuss
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Bryce Canyon, UT. How do you do the hoodoo that you do?
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Zion, UT. I spy with my little eye...
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Vermillion Cliffs, AZ
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Tent Rocks, NM. Are those tent rocks in your park, or are you just excited to see me?
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Mars. Wait- no. Coral Pink Sand Dunes, UT
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Zion, UT. Zi-on? More like Zi-OFF THE HOOK!
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White Sands, NM. Surf's up!
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Dixie, UT. Disneyland nailed it.
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Canyon de Chelly, AZ
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I prefer these slots to the ones in Vegas
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Prickly pear snack
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Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, NM
But adventure could also be less-than-successful attempts at carbequing, eating the same sandwich for five consecutive meals, and making the most of chocolate bars liquified by the desert heat by mixing them with almond butter and calling the concoction “Nutella”. Adventure can be climbing through your motel window because the door jammed, or collecting all your clothes in a hazmat bag to be washed at the highest heat setting because that cheap fleabag motel left you with bites all over. Adventure can be found in a 20-minute conversation with a stranger who is no longer a stranger by the end. Adventure is pulling up to a shady park to nap and recharge for… you guessed it: the next adventure. 
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Vivian receives a warm welcome from her skeleton brethren in... where the hell are we again?
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Let's call it "Nutella" and leave it at that
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Deodorant fondue
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I'd be exhausted too
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Breakfast of champions. And lunch. And dinner. And breakfast again, and lunch, and...
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Too much adventure
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At least I'm eating better than this poor bastard
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And worth every penny.
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Still testing the ideal carbeque engine heat location
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Carbeque 101: Vegetables
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I'm lichen what I'm seein'!
Adventure can be found nearly everywhere, depending on how you frame it. What will you call adventure?
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Bum Voyage!

9/24/2015

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'I’ll pay you to drive my car from Vegas to New York. The money is to keep you in the immediate moment and give you space to explore yourself. Also, I have a plasticized human skeleton. Can you please take that with you or ship it?’

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.


And so this morning I bid adieu to Florence (the porch scarecrow), Laszlo (the space heater), and Roland “Rollie” (The massage foam roller. Yeeeah, we name a lot of inanimate objects around the apartment, which, come to think about it, I probably talk to more than actual humans). With a moment to spare, I threw a cursing fist at the tomato vine that didn’t ripen in time. And because no good story starts with oatmeal, in went the ritual dark chocolate at 6am, and I headed to SFO for the flight to Nevada, where my chariot awaited and the journey would begin.


One hour, two checked bags, and three photos later (Of the friendliest airport car attendant EVER named Autopia. YES, that’s her REAL name. Again- this stuff finds me), I found myself at the helm of a 2000 Honda Odyssey. Loaded with a full tank of gas, a ripped Beejees CD courtesy of Nate's Smog n Go, a bag of bananas, and most importantly in this triple-digit heat, fully-functioning A/C, I strapped Vivian in the passenger seat and headed towards the Strip. (Whaddya mean “Who’s Vivian?” The plasticized skeleton of course! Look alive!)
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Name is destiny. Autopia: Creating a perfect world of cars for you and me.
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No, no- THAMK YOU!
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Take it from Viv- More people died from selfie-stick related incidents this year than shark attacks
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Make a dragon wanna retire man
Thus begins the cross-country adventure! It took Odysseus 10 years to reach Ithaca. God willing, it’ll take me less than two months. You’re invited to (digitally) board the Oddyssey as I squiggle through the Southwest, dip down South, and pinball the road North. Joined by my trusty travel companions Vivian (“Viv”), Finger Puppet Duck (FPD), and Apple Pie (squirrelly kite- just as animated as a pet, without all the mess), I’ll be camping, postcarding, carbequing, and trying my darndest to stay active on the road, inspired by a former colleague’s coined exerseeing. Cruise the website, and sign up for “Joy Rides” blog updates to receive (Weekly? Bi-weekly?) notifications. Also, send me your recommendations!
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Because a casino full of clowns is safer than sleeping in the van...?
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Can only imagine the projectile vomiting required to take a chip out of the porcelain
Take it away, Lucius:
Buckle up, and bum voyage!
-The Bum Vivant
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The Adventure Begins Thurs, Sept  24th...

9/22/2015

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