Road trip!

I’m not a big fan of flying, though I admit it is the most efficient way to get where you’re going, particularly if it’s more than eight hours away. But anyone who flies in this day and age knows that flying is no piece of cake. Small containers of liquids in clear plastic bags, no water or food brought into the airport, removing shoes, belts, jewelry, cell phones, etc. from your person to go through security, with fingers crossed that you don’t set off the alarms anyway. And then, of course, my personal constant concern that the plane will plummet at any moment.

On the other hand, there is almost nothing I like better than getting from Point A to Point B via a car on a highway. While as a kid I used to hate our vacation drives from Nebraska to Colorado, now I love packing up the car with our luggage and a pile of mandatory junk food, loading a trashy audio book into the CD player, and hitting the road.

My husband and I used to do road trips on small two-lane highways, but we’re not as likely to do that anymore. But we will nearly always choose to drive to visit his mother’s house in Chicago or to our second home in Phoenix, since we can stay on an interstate highway the entire time. We split the drives into two days, and find it quite enjoyable.

Some day I would like to drive across the entire country on I-80. It starts in San Francisco, and ends somewhere in New Jersey. My experience with it, however, is only between Cheyenne and Chicago. Even so, there are opportunities to see military museums, pioneer villages, Amish-like communities, trucking museums, aviation museums, Indian villages, and on and on and on. On a recent trip to Chicago, we did, for example, stop and wander around what is purported to be (and I have no reason to disbelieve) the world’s largest truck stop. The Iowa 80 Truck Stop, located in Walcott, Iowa, just outside of Iowa City, is massive. The photo shows that the shopping area (which is just a small part of the entire complex) holds a semi-trailer truck. In fact, there are a total of three semis in the facility, with plenty of room for the rest of the essentials, such as Christian books, CDs, DVDs, car parts, naked women decals, etc.

One of the things I like best about road trips is eating the local foods. Every state has its own specialties. One of the most perplexing to me is (at the risk of offending any Iowans who happen to stumble upon this blog) the loose meat sandwich. I have given this sandwich several tries. I should like them. I simply don’t. To me, they taste as bland as, well, as loose meat sandwiches.

Ground beef, browned until it loses its red color, cooked with onions, served with mustard and pickles on a hamburger bun. No flavor. Sorry, my Iowa friends. Since, I, like Bill O’Reilly, am fair and balanced, here is a recipe so that you can try it yourself. Maid-Rite is the fast-food place where we have tried to like these local specialties.

Once you venture into Nebraska (my state of origin), you find the runza. On the road, these are primarily found at the cleverly-named Runza Hut. While I loved these as a child, my experience as of late is that they taste about the same as a loose meat sandwich. I blame it, however, on the bread.

Here is a recipe for homemade runzas that I have had since childhood:

One recipe yeast dough
½ lb. ground beef
3 c. chopped green cabbage
1 c. chopped onion
Salt and pepper

Prepare dough and let rise.

Brown ground beef for until it loses its red color; add onion and cabbage. Cover and cook until both are wilted, stirring often, about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Roll dough ¼ in. thick. Cut into squares. Place some of the meat filling on each square, and pinch corners together. Place upside down on greased baking sheet and let rise for 20 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

10 servings.

My recollection is that they are quite good. I think the key is the bread.

Now then, as you near Chicago, your local eating choices are much more pronounced, and much yummier. Pizza, Italian beef sandwiches, and hot dogs (they only call them Chicago-style hot dogs when you are not in Chicago), to name but a few. There are Dunkin Donuts about every three blocks, and locally-owned pizza joints everywhere you look. And here’s a point of note: Most people think of deep-dish pizza when they think of Chicago pizza. My husband, who hails since birth from the south side of Chicago, knows only thin-crust pizza. It might be a north side/south side thing. I don’t want to get in the middle of a turf battle, but I must say that the pizza from his neighborhood joint is, without question, the best I’ve ever eaten this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

On our way to Chicago, we stopped in a small town a ways east of Council Bluffs, Iowa, to get breakfast and use the facilities. We chose Subway, as it was just off the interstate. Located just behind the Subway restaurant was a small diner, long-since out of business. It made me sad to think of the passage of locally-owned dining establishments such as this. Instead of a breakfast sandwich that tasted pretty much like a breakfast sandwich from any fast-food place, we could have enjoyed homemade biscuits and gravy. Those were the traveling days.