Ear to the Ground See Travel Map

Food

Best breakfast feature ***** a dough machine and a waffle iron for making your own warm waffles with syrup. Yammee! At the Super 8 Motel in Ogden, Utah

Best breakfast ***** at Good Harvest Cafe in Crescent City, California. Blueberry buck wheat pancakes with quality maple syrup and delicious eggs Florentine with spinach

Best lunch ***** at Nora’s Fish House in Hood River, Oregon. Fresh and sustainable seafood from Californian sea bass to Alaskan halibut

Best dinner ***** our homemade meal with our friend Donna in Tiburon, California. Big shrimps, fresh salad and vegetables from her garden, pasta with homemade pesto and for drinks the Danish speciality hyldeblomst - a drink made out of elderberry flowers. For dessert Hagendasz vanilla ice cream with an abundance of blackberries off her vines. Plus fresh water from her spring. Just couldn’t be better.

Best restaurant dinner ***** at The Tides in Crescent City, California. Fresh seafood, all your heart could desire and a great clam chowder!

Best homemade dessert ***** Kathleen’s homemade brownies waiting at the float club in Portland, Oregon

Best restaurant dessert ***** the serious hot fudge Sunday at Pizza Nova at one of the San Diego marinas in California- and it is big enough to share. Their pizzas are very good too  

Motels

Best deal ***** Orchard Motel in La Grande, Oregon. An old motel that has been remodeled, we had a small, but very neat room with quilted bed blanket and pillows and the best towels of the whole trip - thick, olive green and not fluffy. They also have an excellent working wifi. Only $42 for staying the night - a good deal.

Working space

Best working space ***** s/v Friendship, San Diego. Ross’ 30 foot Catalina is my writing and radio station in Paradise.

Hi tech journey aids

Best invention for our road trip ***** the GPS was fantastic, getting us to every place we wanted to visit. You can really concentrate on driving when you have one of these, especially in the big cities. Garmin, thank you so much - and Ross, thank you for buying it!

Second best invention **** the radar - saving us speeding tickets; that Audi tt has fast energy.

Best tech assistance on the road ***** Gabe, our webmaster genius .

Worst traffic lights * In Canada - small and hanging so low you need your GPS to find them .

Hospitality

Hospitality ***** all 5 stars, thank you Joanne, AZ, Carol & Soleil, AZ, Donna, CA, Kathleen & Joel, OR, Ahmad & Graca, BC.

Teas and teachings

***** thank you to all the teahouses we visited for sharing your best teas and teaching us about the ways of tea

Weather

Worst driving weather * through thunderstorm and hail in Utah

Best driving weather ***** 98 % of the time - thank you weatherman!

Our gypsy silver Audi tt at the float club in Portland, OR - a fast, fun and safe car. After a couple of thousand miles I even figured out the climate control that kept us comfortable on the road, from the 116 degrees F Arizona desert to the hail storm in Utah. Great Bose sound system, real bright headlights and it just stays glued to the road on the curved mountain roads.