Kansas City-based Paleterias Tropicana is a restaurant that defies a simple description. The company started in 2004 as an ice cream parlor, serving housemade Mexican-style ice cream and paletas (ice pops). But then the menu kept expanding. There's a lineup of smoothies, made from the fresh fruit piled behind the counter...
As I mentioned in my Maui post, the Road to Hana is a winding and narrow rainforest drive that's a highway only in the technical sense of the term. Distance-wise, it's only about 60 miles to Hana, but your journey will take all day: there's a 25 mph speed limit for much of the route, dozens of one-lane bridges, frequent photo stops, detours for hikes, and multiple swimming opportunities.
2018 was the first year I published a list of the best foods I ate. I started the list at the beginning of December, so my memory was a bit hazy on some of the details, and I had to rely on Instagram photos, blog posts, and articles. This year, I kept a running "best foods" post in my drafts all year long. As I added to the post—a dessert here, an appetizer there—I realized that I wasn't only making a list of foods.
Over my past decade of travel, I've stayed at boutique hotels and bed and breakfasts. I've checked into budget motels and hostels. I've rented Airbnb apartments and cabins at national parks. I've stayed on a boat and at the world's only Frank Lloyd Wright hotel. Nothing prepared me for the Chateau Avalon in Kansas City, Kansas.
For years, my approach to travel was very checklist-based: see the thing, eat the food, on to the next town. Mike and I often stayed in a different place each night, ate every meal out, and had a...
Kansas City, Kansas might be most famous for its iconic barbecue, but there's much more to the city's food scene besides smoked meat. Partly, that's due to Kansas City's diversity: there isn't an ethnic majority, and students in the public schools speak 200 different languages. In addition to that rich cultural diversity, Kansas City has a vibrant community of family-owned restaurants and local food producers, some of which have been...
One of my favorite things to do on vacation is to go grocery shopping. At home, grocery shopping can be a chore. On vacation, it's a chance to get a peek at how people live in another place and...
If you know only one thing about Kansas City's food scene, it's probably that they're world-famous for their barbecue. Kansas City-style barbecue originated in the 1920s, when African-American entrepreneur Henry Perry started selling slow-cooked barbecued ribs wrapped in newspaper.
Elk Horn, Iowa is one of the most Danish places in America: 43 percent of the town's 650 residents can claim Danish heritage. There are Danish flags lining the streets, two annual festivals celebrating Danish food and culture, and attractions like the Museum of Danish America. There's also a place to get a taste of Denmark: The Danish Table Hygge Kitchen...
Mike and I spend most of our weekends running in opposite directions (literally in my case, since I run seven miles on Saturday and three miles on Sunday). We use the weekends to catch up with friends, do chores, and work on hobbies and personal projects. After one too many weekends when the only significant chunk of time we spent together was grocery shopping, we realized that we needed to prioritize time with each other
I've eaten plenty of pizza on my travels, from classic coal-fired pizza at Grimaldi's in Brooklyn to the Mountain Pie at Beau Jo's in Colorado. But on my recent trip to Kansas City, Kansas, I got to enjoy pizza in a whole new way: by making it myself at 1889 Pizza Napoletana.
I have a thing for small towns that lean hard into their European heritage, like German-tinged New Ulm, Minnesota, and New Glarus, Wisconsin (a.k.a. America's Little Switzerland). There's something touching and very American about preserving bits and pieces of the Old Country while settling wholeheartedly in the new one.
Iowa seems like an improbable destination for world-famous architecture. But Mason City, Iowa (about 30 miles south of the Minnesota border) is exactly that. The small town is home to the world's only remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel: the Historic Park Inn.
Although I haven't made it to Italy yet, I have eaten plenty of delicious pizza on my travels. I've tried the iconic coal-fired pizza at Grimaldi's in Brooklyn and taken a pizza tour in Milwaukee. I...
For the past several years, I’ve been very rigid about how I traveled—meticulously researched itineraries, figuring out the very best places to eat, and so on. That makes sense for my press trips for this blog and research trips for articles, since I'm on the job and have professional commitments to the convention and visitors bureaus and publications I'm working with.
I've been writing an annual summer roundup post for almost as long as I've had this blog. Most of them read like frantic checklists of restaurants, day trips, and recipes. For a long time, that was...
When I started drafting the intro for this post, I realized that I've written some version of it at least a dozen times over the past several years of blogging: I needed something to bring to a...
If you are the sort of traveler who likes to launch out of bed at 7:00 a.m., ready for a day packed with sightseeing and activities, Sundays can be challenging. Many attractions and businesses are closed; others have limited hours. One workaround is to make Sunday an on-the-road day, but that's not always an option. A couple of months ago, my travel schedule put me in Fargo, North Dakota on a Sunday.
Lately, my favorite thing to order when I eat out is French fries. It started a couple of months ago when Josh and I were deciding where to go for dinner. He threw out an impressively eclectic list of suggestions—Spoon & Stable, the Mill Northeast, Punch Pizza. But the thing is, I didn't want to eat award-winning French-inspired cuisine or elevated bar fare or Neapolitan pizza. All I wanted was an order of fries.
There are lots of great reasons to sign up for a CSA share, whether you want to support a local farmer, eat more vegetables, or discover new types of produce. But as wonderful as it is to get a box full of fresh produce each week, sometimes it can be challenging to get through it all before the next delivery shows up.
