18 – Are you being served?
If you spend 90 days anywhere you are going to eat a lot of meals, and one
might think that with travelling constantly and having fairly limited catering
facilities the result would be 'hurray, I can eat out every night!' But believe me,
you do get bored of eating out - and fed up of restrictions such as when,
where and what you can eat.
Certainly we almost always made our own breakfast, often our own
lunch, and we ate in the van on average two nights a week. Not that we
needed to do this in order to stay on budget, there are so many places to eat
cheaply in the States. These include Jack In The Box (McDonalds-esque)
where we both had dinner for a princely sum of just over $5!
In fact, and in spite of this cheapness, we would probably have opted
to home-cook more often, but in some places it was just too awkward to
organise this. For example, while we were in hotels in New York and Las
Vegas (obviously), or when we were in primitive (i.e. no microwave and sub-
efficient fridge) camping with a limited (one) selection of shops available in
Death Valley.
Most evenings we did go out to restaurants, which raised the question of
'where to go to eat?'. Very occasionally the choice was obvious, due to a lack
of choice, such as in Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. But on the
occasions when we were faced with picking from at least half a dozen
unknown eateries we almost freaked out. Almost, but not quite.
Our sanity was saved by our Lonely Planet guidebook, which listed