March 2009

Coming from the northwest, as we did, to reach Boulder, Utah, you take a right turn at Capitol Reef National Park and head south toward the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, just a few miles beyond the town, and then the nearby Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks.

Roads from Port Townsend don’t go much farther north in the United States, so we made a U-turn to head back south on the same highways that brought us to Washington. In Oregon we turned inland and traveled high-desert country down to Reno, Nevada.

“The fish and chips, please,” Cheryl says.

“Two?” our seasoned waitress asks.

Three of us are dining today, so it seems most likely that she’s asking about how many pieces of fish Cheryl wants. Cheryl responds, “I guess, is that about right?”

“Well, most of my girls have two,” she says, then adds, “unless they’re my dockworker girls, and then they have three or four.”

From Paso Robles we drove over to the Pacific coast and took the dramatically scenic Highway 1 north along the shore to Santa Cruz.

The first day of our visit to California’s beautiful Central Coast wine area we felt like characters in Sideways, the popular 2004 film.

On our last night in Los Angeles (check out the first part of our L.A. visit) we celebrated Bill’s birthday at a delightfully plucky new restaurant called Animal. Despite the name, Chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo love vegetables, fruits, all kinds of seasonings, and probably anything else edible.

“At the table, one never gets old,” the menus announce at Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. If this bit of Italian folk wisdom is true anywhere, it’s got to be at these twin new restaurants that sit side-by-side in Hollywood. Most of the cooks, servers, and diners are having so much fun with the food they don’t have time to age.

This is a great time of the year to be in Phoenix. The sun shines brightly, bringing the desert alive with color, but the temperatures stay moderate. No one wants to be indoors, especially major-league baseball players and their fans.